This post continues our series on the Actipro Themes being added for all our WPF controls in the upcoming 2011.2 version.
The previous post covered the new common asset pool and how it helps us achieve a level of visual consistency throughout all our custom control products as well as WPF native controls that you won’t find elsewhere.
In today’s post, we’ll take a glimpse at the major visual facelift we’ve done on the Docking/MDI for WPF product for the 2011.2 version.
Goals
As seen in the first post of this series, Actipro Themes will include updated menu, toolbar, and statusbar appearances that were inspired by Visual Studio 2010’s look. For the 2011.2 version, we wanted to extend this look to the Docking/MDI product as well since it is very often used with menus, toolbars, and statusbars.
The design of the VS 2010 is interesting in that it goes a bit more high contrast by using dark workspace colors to deemphasize the unimportant portions of the user interface. It contrasts this by using light colors for the content area of each document and tool window. There are fewer lines used for borders, which simplifies the appearance and reduces unnecessary distracting UI.
We’ve taken these concepts and ran with them for our Docking/MDI visual updates.
First Look
Here’s the first look at the new visual updates:
This screenshot shows the default Aero look. Note how well it combines with our new theme updates for the native WPF menu and statusbar.
Here is the same window but with standard MDI activated instead, along with the Office black theme.
In both cases you can see how the entire docking window layout is designed to focus on content instead of distracting your eye with non-active UI.
Summary
We’ve taken a bold step forward with the appearance of Docking/MDI, but it’s one that harnesses the latest UI designs and looks great with all the other Actipro Themes updates being made for 2011.2.
In the next post of this series, we’ll take a look at the various themes that come out of the box with Actipro Themes.