The Hailstrom Docking Library adds support to Win32 that allows for the easy creation of docking windows. Docking windows are child windows that can attach themselves to an owner window and can be dragged and pulled off the owner window to become popup windows. Microsoft Visual Studio is an example of an application that uses such a library.

Create docking windows that have the look and feel of Microsoft® Office 2000 and Microsoft® Visual Studio with the use of the Hailstorm Docking Library. The library is customizable and comes in the form of a Dynamically Linked Library (DLL). The SDK includes two Dynamically Linked Libraries, one compiled for speed, the other for size.

Realtime Dragging - Performs the dragging and docking operations in realtime, so what you see is what you get while docking.

Fixed Windows - Supports fixed windows such as toolbars that are not resized.

Sizable Windows - Supports sizable windows that can assume any size.

Three Grippers - There are three possible grippers. A small one line gripper is used when the client window cannot be closed or expanded when docked. Otherwise the gripper can either be a thicker two line gripper or a caption.

Owner Drawn - The painting of the docking windows can be overridden and custom owner drawn painting can occur. Owner drawn can be done in sections where you might only choose to paint the title of a window but leave the rest default.

Custom Caption - The caption gripper can be customized by selecting the font, text color, background brush, and caption edge.

Compact Size - The entire library has been written in C and Win32, the Tiny release of the redistributable DLL is only 46,080 bytes.

Windows Versions - Works on Windows 95 and greater and Windows NT4 and greater without any shell upgrades.

Documentation - The library comes with MSDN-style documentation compiled into a compiled HTML help file (*.chm).

A demo of the library is available from our Trial Download section.

The full documentation is available online. The online documentation can give you a better idea of how exactly the library works and what it supports. The documentation is located at our online Documentation Library.

This library is sold under a standard per developer license.

If you have any comments, questions, requests or suggestions about this library please post them on the Hailstorm Support Forum.

This library is now available and can be ordered via our Order section.