Imitating the look and feel of Visual Studio 2012

Question

I know this is a very open ended question, so bear with me - is there any good way to imitate the look and feel of Visual Studio 2012's interface? I would very much like to emulate teh drag/drop capabilities and just the overall cleanliness of design.

So far I know about AvalonDock, WPFMDI, SyncFusion's approach, and Infragistic's Dock Manager. Infragistic's approach looks much like what I would like to have, but 1) I have no idea if I can use them in my current project (licensing, etc.) and 2) I'd like to know (at least on a highish level) on how they actually work. Can anyone shed some light on how they would approach this?

I'll post my train of thought as an answer for starters.

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Visual Studio's interface (2012)

AvalonDock 2.0

WPFMDI (kinda ugly)

SyncFusion's Dock Manager (very much not open-source)

And lastly Infragistic's Docking Manager (also commercial)

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Again, VS2012 imitation is the goal - these are just a bunch of projects that have already attempted to complete this goal in the general.

Answer 1

In my silly logic, each tabbed interface should actually be a tab.

When the user clicks and drags the tab to the primary orientation (left/right for horizontal tabs, top/bottom for verticals), the tabs should change their ordering to accommodate and the view should stay the same.

However, if the tab is dragged perpendicular to its primary orientation, then a snapshot should be made of the tab, it should shrink to about 60% of its original size, and should be desaturated/made translucent. As the user drags it around, the image should obviously follow.

When the user mouse enters the center region of a TabContainer (subclass of Canvas? Page? I dunno), the little overlay pops up for easy docking.

If the user drags it to a TabBar, it adds itself to the appropriate spot on that TabBar (according to where the mouse is, etc.). Every TabContainer has exactly one TabBar.

What I can't figure out in this design is how you can grad a tab and have it fixed/floating/autohiding/etc. as what happens in VS.