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Showing posts from April, 2015

WPF anti-pattern: Docking panels

Developers love docking panels (especially Windows developers), they love the ability to 'dock' a panel to the left, top, right bottom of the window, and repeat this with windows inside windows inside windows ad infinitum... Shown below is the docking ability in Visual Studio - it works great because the target user has the required level of understanding of a complex app. The problem is the majority of users haven't got a clue about them... When they accidentally drag a tab or window and the UI suddenly show docking points like the above screen shot they haven't got a clue what to do to get back to where they were. This coupled with the look on their faces makes me think the use of docking panels should be avoid in all but the most complicated apps - the average business line app developed using WPF doesn't really need a docking panel. I call the use of docking panels in general an anti-pattern :)