The control that allows docking all over the parent form is a commercial control. Sorry that I don't remember the vendor that makes this control.

As a general rule, those controls are all custom owner drawn controls, and a really good resource for controls that mimic the behaviour of those controls is
found at http://www.thecodeproject.com

Register (it's free) and download and play around with some of the controls found there.

The solution explorer is a variant of the treeview control.
The toolbox is a variant of what is commonly referred to as an Outlook bar (probably because it is in the email program MS Outlook)

Here is a couple links to point you in the right direction.

http://www.thecodeproject.com/cs/miscctrl/CustomizedLabelEdit.asp
http://www.thecodeproject.com/cs/miscctrl/toolbox.asp

If you have a more specific question we can probably help you figure that out too.

Yeah... As you can imagine, the Visual Studio team is a large development effort, and you could expect that a lot of work went into the UI to make it slick and flexible.

I think that docking control is (or will be) a standard windows control, but won't really be available until the next version of VS. Or maybe it's part of the Vista UI stuff; the new UI designer (is it called Cider?) has it in there...

the company that makes it is called crownwood software, and the product is dot net magic.

here:

http://www.dotnetmagic.com/


Current version, of course, is used in VS.net, etc. It's rather expensive too, however, there is an older version avaliable for free (although they don't like to advertise it). It can be downloaded here:

http://www.codeproject.com/cs/miscctrl/MagicDocking/MagicLibrary.zip

alternativly, a full installed with example code can be downloaded from their web page, but you need to sign up via email

http://www.dotnetmagic.com/magic_download.html

For a free, open-source, docking component, look at DockPanel Suite:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dockpanelsuite/

Tim Dawson's SandDock once was free for non-commercial projects, but the "free" licensing option doesn't seem to exist anymore. You can check it anyway:
http://www.divil.co.uk/net/controls/sanddock/downloads.aspx

If you don't mind going commercial, there are tons of similar libraries, made by companies such as Infragistic, ActiPro, Syncfusion, DotNetMagic, Olivio IT, ... Just google for "Docking"...