Phil Wright, sole developer and owner of Crownwood Software, has always impressed us with the quality of the code he’s produced. Back in the early days, DotNetMagic was completely free, but a couple of years ago Phil took the decision to put the venture on a commercial footing.

The latest version has full support for the new .NET framework 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005. You should bear in mind that this version is .NET 2.0 specific. However, purchasers of DotNetMagic 4 will also get, free of charge, the previous version three code that’s intended for VS.Net 2003 and targeted at with .NET 1.1.

One of the best enhancements in VS.NET 2005 (both the full version and the Express editions) was the ‘compass point’ docking guides, which appear when moving a dockable pane or toolbar from one location to another. Without the docking guides, it was frankly anybody’s guess where the item would finish up at the end of the drag-drop operation. Now you can simply move the dragged item onto a specific guide and the item will be placed exactly where you expected.

Unfortunately, Microsoft didn’t make these functions available to other developers but, happily, DotNetMagic 4 corrects this omission. Phil has incorporated docking guides into the library, as can be seen in the image.

In addition to enhanced docking support, the library also includes an impressive tab control whose appearance can be set to emulate Office 2003 or the VS.NET 2005 IDE. This control has a huge number of customisable features, including the ability to select different tabs simply by hovering the mouse over them. We were impressed with the tree control, which again has a huge number of features including the ability to set a background image, associate a radio button or check box with different nodes.

A fully functional version of the library can be freely downloaded from the website for an evaluation. This comes as a prebuilt assembly that will naturally ‘nag’ you to buy the product. DotNetMagic comes with full source code and HTML help (.chm file), which sadly doesn’t integrate with Visual Studio. However, there’s an in-depth set of sample projects all of which also include full source.