WPF and Silverlight Workspace Manager (coming in v2010.2)

I saw this one fly by as part of the What’s New proofing that’s going on (Ray is doing a fine job!) and the image alone made it worth publishing a blog post about it.

First of all, what’s a workspace? A workspace is a particular layout of DevExpress controls together with their visual state. As an example, DXDocking allows the end-user to rearrange the panels in the app, DXBars allows them to relocate the toolbars and to change the commands in those toolbars. These different layouts can be persisted as workspaces. You can then use the workspace manager to switch between the saved workspaces at run-time.

That’s all well and good and is some very nice functionality but we’ve also added some visual transitions so that the switching isn’t totally instantaneous (perhaps leaving the end-user wondering if something really happened). Check out this GIF animation showing off three particular transitions:

The WorkspaceManager can be used with any DevExpress visual control that supports serialization (such as the BarManager, DockLayoutManager, DXGrid, etc). The main visual control may also contain other serializable DevExpress controls as children and in this situation the WorkspaceManager will access and organize the layouts of the child controls as well.

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