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I’m evaluatiing Prof-UIS and had a few questions:

1) On the page http://www.prof-uis.com/FAQView.aspx?CID=96#_ctl5_divDescr it says, "How to put a toolbar on the dialog in the control bar? The ProfStudio sample shows how toolbars can be used on dialogs in dockable control bars. Of course, such toolbars cannot be dockable." We are looking to have control bar specific toolbars that can dock to a specific dockable control bar (dynamic bar in Prof-UIS terms) but not to the main frame. Is there a way to do this? I note that at least one of your competitiors has a demo that shows this capability in their library.

2) Is there anything in the design of the library that precludes its use in a MTI application (ie. like MS Word where one EXE is running that has multiple top level SDI frames (one per document)) where each top level frame has its own UI thread? I did not see a MTI example in your demos.

3) In the MTI scenario, I’m assuming that all of the toolbars / control bars would be limited to docking with their parent frame. Is that correct?

Thanks for any help you can give me in making a case for purchasing your library to my manager.

The re-dockable windows both in MFC and in Prof-UIS are always linked to the frame window. Typically the frame window is the main SDI/MDI frame window or MDI child frame window and you come across re-dockable bars only in these types of frame windows. But it is not a insurmountable obstacle and it is possible to create a frame window as a child of any other window like a control bar or a dialog. Of course, this child frame window may have its own dockable bars of any kind. Once we helped one of our customers with this. We do not include such samples in Prof-UIS because we think dockable windows inside a resizable control bar or a dialog may confuse users.

There is no problem with creating multi frame and/or multi threaded applications. But we strongly recommend you follow what Microsoft is doing: all the application windows are created and managed in the main thread. This is easier and faster in most cases. All the MS Office applications follow the same way. You can run MS Word and create 30 frames. The number of threads will not be changed.

If you need (a) sample application(s) with regard to your questions, please let us know.

A sample app showing that would be great! It would give me something tangible to show my manager. So far I’m really impressed with the support side of your company!

Here is a sample application that demonstrates both a multi top frame interface and a dockable toolbar inside a resizable control bar: test_frame_in_bar.zip