Creating the Rules Explorer window

The Rules Explorer Window is a Visio anchor window, of which there are many examples available, including some in the Microsoft Visio 2013 SDK. The resultant window is a sub-window of the document window, just as with a number of other built-in windows such as the Drawing Explorer, Shape Data window and, of course, the new Issues window. These windows can float free, anchored to an edge of the drawing window or merged with other sub-windows.

The following screenshot of Visual Studio 2012 shows that the FormExplorer class merely acts as a host for the UserControlExplorer control:

The UserControlExplorer control is the WPF control that contains all of the goodies and some code behind. The next image of the Visual Studio 2012 UI shows the UserControlExplorer.xaml file:

The Document Outline shows that very little is defined directly within the TreeViewMain element because it calls on templates defined in Resources.

Self-describing tree views

We wanted the tree...