Tutorials

Hands-on, step-by-step tutorials that walk you through building real applications with AvalonDock. Each tutorial builds a complete, working example from scratch.

These tutorials assume you have already completed the Quick Start guide and are familiar with WPF basics.

Choose a Tutorial

Tutorial What You’ll Build Key Topics
MVVM IDE Application A VS Code-style IDE with sidebar toggles ToolboxBase, Document, IDockLayoutService, ToggleDockingManager, DockZone, DI
Dependency Injection Deep Dive DI patterns and APIs in depth AddDockLayoutService builder, DockLayoutBuilder, ConfigureToggleDock, factory registration, testing
Styling & Theming A theme-switchable app with custom branding Runtime theme switching, brush overrides, custom theme classes, application-wide theming
Layout Persistence An app that remembers its window layout XML/JSON serialization, MVVM serialization callbacks, auto-save, layout reset

How the Tutorials Are Organized

Each tutorial follows the same structure:

  1. What you’ll build — A preview of the finished result
  2. Prerequisites — What you need before starting
  3. Step-by-step instructions — Incremental steps with full code listings
  4. How it works — Explanation of the key concepts
  5. Next steps — Where to go from here

Sample Projects

These tutorials are inspired by the sample projects included in the AvalonDock repository under source/:

Project Pattern Description
MVVMTestApp MVVM + Singleton Classic MVVM with a static Workspace singleton
AvalonDockCodeApp MVVM + DI Modern approach using Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection
VS2013Test MVVM + Themed IDE Production-like IDE simulator with multiple tool panels
CaliburnDockTestApp Caliburn.Micro Integration with the Caliburn.Micro MVVM framework
MLibTest MLib Theming Unified theming with the MLib theming library
TestApp Code-behind Comprehensive feature showcase (all themes, WinForms interop)
WinFormsTestApp WinForms Host Hosting AvalonDock in a WinForms application

You can run any sample project from the solution:

cd source
dotnet run --project MVVMTestApp

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