Tabs Studio Blog (organizing Visual Studio document tabs)

You can use WPF animation effects to customize Tabs Studio presentation. Tabs Studio v1.7.3 demonstrates fade effect for the yellow extension background when mouse is over it and transition effect between states for the close tab button. You can turn on these two effects in the Quick Style window:

For example, fade-in effect for an extension starts on mouse enter event, during 0.2 seconds it changes border color from transparent to gray and it changes yellow background from transparent to opaque:

  
<EventTrigger RoutedEvent="Control.MouseEnter">
  <EventTrigger.Actions>
    <BeginStoryboard>
      <Storyboard>
        <ColorAnimation  Duration="0:0:0.2" Storyboard.TargetName="Border"    Storyboard.TargetProperty="BorderBrush.Color"  To="Gray"/>
        <DoubleAnimation Duration="0:0:0.2" Storyboard.TargetName="LabelText" Storyboard.TargetProperty="Background.Opacity" To="1"/>
      </Storyboard>
    </BeginStoryboard>
  </EventTrigger.Actions>
</EventTrigger>

Full sample effects definitions are available when you turn on animation and generate style in the Quick Style window. I think the most common customization for the sample effects provided will be adjustment of animation duration.

I’ve updated default TabExtension style to ease extension selection. When mouse is over extension it is highlighted with yellow background now, there is no more shadow for extension and there is more padding around tab extension and tab name:

WPF 4.0 introduces new text rendering options. You can customize Tabs Studio text with these new options in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 using a style like this one:

<Style TargetType="TabsStudio:Tabs" BasedOn="{StaticResource DefaultTabsStyle}">
    <Setter Property="TextOptions.TextFormattingMode" Value="Display"/>
    <Setter Property="TextOptions.TextRenderingMode" Value="Aliased"/>
</Style>

It would be great to make sharper text works in Visual Studio 2008 as well, but right now I don’t see a good solution. Simply installing .NET 4.0 Beta 2 runtime on a Visual Studio 2008 machine doesn’t make these new options available to Tabs Studio automatically.