How to activate a pane in the Telerik Docking control for WPF and Silverlight?

One very requested scenario when the developers are using a Docking control is to activate a pane on certain user action. For example we may have a pane that contains some kind of output like the one in Visual Studio and when a message is added, the pane should pop-up wherever it is. Another example is the 'Find' dialog of the Visual Studio when the user preses Ctrl+F.

This feature could be easily archived with the Telerik Docking control for Silverlight and WPF. In this blog post I will guide you through the implementation of a simple method that accomplishes this task and an example in which you could try it out.

First of all we will create a UserControl and reuse it in WPF and Silverlight (you will see how in the attached example). The content of this UserControl will be a Grid panel with two rows - the first one will have 'auto' height and the second one - will use '*' height. In the first row we will put a menu and will populate it with some items later. In the Second row we will place a Docking control with some panes and split containers. Here is the Xaml:

As you can see in the Xaml, we will need to handle the ItemClick event of the RadMenu. Let's imagine we have a method that 'activates' a given pane called ActivatePane. In this case the ItemClick event handler of the RadMenu will look like this:

Implementing the ActivatePane method will solve our task completely. There are some cases which we could include or exclude in solving the problem:

• If the pane is visible, pinned and selected, we don't need to do anything else to activate it
• If the pane is visible and pinned, but is not selected, we need to find its parent RadPaneGroup (we are sure that its parent is a RadPaneGroup, because the pane is pinned) and set its SelectedItem to the pane
• If the pane is no pinned, we need to call its Focus method. This will force it to pop-up
• If the pane is not visible, we should show it and perform all the above checks and actions

Here is the code that accomplishes this task:

With this we are ready with our task. You can download the full demo from here. It contains two projects - one for Silverlight and one for WPF.