Another new feature that we have added to our Docking & MDI for WPF product, is magnetism. This is a popular feature of the Dock controls in Actipro UIStudio and will be available in the upcoming WPF Studio release.
The magnetism features take effect when dragging and resizing undocked tool windows, as well as documents in the MDI area (standard MDI mode only). When magnetism is active, any undocked tool windows or standard MDI documents that are dragged will attempt to "snap" their corners to other nearby window corners. If a corner is not found nearby, then the dragged window will attempt to align to the edge of another nearby window instead. This makes it very easy for the end user to align windows in a column or row. Additionally, the resizing of windows will also use magnetism to "snap" edges to the location of other nearby window edges.
There are two new properties on the DockSite that can be used to customize the magnetism behavior. The first is MagnetismSnapDistance, which indicates the distance at which magnetism begins to snap windows being dragged. If this value is greater than zero, magnetism is enabled. If set to zero, then magnetism is disabled. Increasing this property's value, which defaults to 5, will increase the range over which the magnetism will work.
The other property is MagnetismGapDistance, which indicates the distance between windows that are snapped together via magnetism. If this value is greater than zero, there will be a gap between windows that are snapped together.
Again, these great new features will be available in the next build of WPF Studio.