How to determine which CDockablePane in a group is currently active in Visual Studio 2013

Question

I understand that to activate a pane, I can do the following:
dockablePane->ShowPane(TRUE, FALSE, TRUE);
But, in a group of panes, how can I tell which pane is currently active?
For instance, let's say there are 3 groups of panes on the screen.  The first group contains three tabs captioned "A", "B", and "C".  The second group contains "D", "E", and "F" and the
third group contains "G", "H", and "I".
How would I determine the active pane within each group?  (As an example for reference, within Visual Studio in the left pane group, I can currently see the contents of "Solution Explorer" while "Class View", "Property M...",
"Resource Vi..." and "Team Explo..." are within the same group but not active.  In the bottom group, I can see the contents of "Output" while "Find Results 1" and "Find Results 2" are present but not active".  
In the right group, I can see "MySource.cpp" while "MySource.h" is present but not active.  So, I need to know how to request from each pane whether they are the current tab within their container or not.
Steve

Answer 1

Hi Steve,
Thanks for posting in MSDN forum.
(As an example for reference, within Visual Studio in the left pane group, I can currently see the contents of "Solution Explorer" while "Class View", "Property M...", "Resource Vi..." and "Team Explo..."
are within the same group but not active. In the bottom group, I can see the contents of "Output" while "Find Results 1" and "Find Results 2" are present but not active". In the right group, I can see "MySource.cpp"
while "MySource.h" is present but not active. So, I need to know how to request from each pane whether they are the current tab within their container or not.
This scenerio in your example, we don't need to know the current tab within which tab group. Actually I don't understand why do you need to know that? If you are using
AFX_DOCK_TYPE::DT_SMART   model dock pane, the dock pane should be implemented in a internal MFC
CSmartDockingManager
class and it is not intended to be used directly from your code. . You could read the source code of this class at VS installed path-> VC->altmfc->src->mfc->afxsmartdockingmanage.cpp
For the dock pane layout in VS interface, I remember there is a sample named Visual Studio Demo sample in Visual C++ 2008 Feature Pack. You can download it at here.
https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/b4e6cb6e-e2a8-4e02-9c67-0dc431618157/visual-c-2008-feature-pack-samples-where-to-find?forum=vcgeneral
And the dock pane control implements the core functionality that controls docking layout in a main frame window by CDockingManager class.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb983791.aspx
A greate article about using CDockablePane:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/493218/Understanding-CDockablePane
Please tell us more details about what you want to do.
Best regards,
Shu Hu
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