dotnet windows forms designtime: Does anyone know how to implement the 'solution explorer' and 'properties'
sliding panels you get in VS2005.

One way seems to be to put buttons on a panel for the 'autohide' bar and set
the image propety to vertically oriented text (e.g. created in Paint). The
animation could be acheived by continously/quickly changing the width
property of another panel containing the controls you wish to 'slide out'

There must be a better way?

What's more, I would like to do this in the confines of an SDI application
(so the slide outs will need to be controls and not forms)

Tim,

I appreciate you taking the time to respond.

My question was really how to do this in VS using the controls available (I
gave an
example of using panels and buttons) - also, it's not so much the docking
and moving around I am after - rather a fixed tab strip is fine as long as I
can click a tab (or button that looks like a tab!) with text oriented 90
degrees, and have a control slide out from the tab strip.

Tim,

There are commercial products that do this. Here are a few...
http://www.divil.co.uk/net/controls/sanddock/
http://www.dotnetmagic.com

There are also some freebies as well...
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dockpanelsuite/

You may also want to search through the CodeProject
(http://www.codeproject.com/) to see what you can find.

--
Tim Wilson
..NET Compact Framework MVP

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You could probably get some good hints from the Dock Panel Suite source
code:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dockpanelsuite/

You should be able to play with the TabControl and ownerdraw to get the tabs
to look the way you want.
http://blogs.msdn.com/winformsue/archive/2006/03/14/551564.aspx

In addition, if you're targeting .NET Fx 2.0 then you can use the ToolStrip
control instead of the TabControl. The ToolStrip control is a very
customizable control.
http://blogs.msdn.com/winformsue/archive/2006/03/21/557054.aspx

Using either the TabControl or the ToolStrip control may allow you to not
have to deal with individual Buttons.

The approach that you indicated in your original post sounds good. One thing
that I would add, in addition to what I've added above, is that if you use
the width of the Panel, starting at a width of zero, to show this Panel to
the user then it may have the appearance or "rolling out". If you want to
have the Panel appear to "slide out" then you can set the location of the
Panel to something negative (off the screen) and then change the location
until it is completely shown.

--
Tim Wilson
..NET Compact Framework MVP

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