AvalonDock: The document model's view is recreated everytime the tab changes.

[ayrtonsoftware]

When switching tabs, the view model's underlying user control is created, deleting the previous one. What I expect to happen is the tab is just switched and the previously created user control should be displayed....

[XceedBoucherS]

I can suggest you to try the Plus version of the Toolkit (https://xceed.com/xceed-toolkit-plus-for-wpf/), available for free for 45 days. In this version of the product, the DockingManager contains 2 new properties :
-CacheDocumentTabItems
-CacheAnchorableTabItems
When set to true, these properties make sure the tab content are loaded only once.

[ayrtonsoftware]

That is not an option for me. I have seen projects that this behavior does not happen and the views are indeed not recreated. I just can't figure out how that happens.

[Dirkster99]

You are looking at an implementation that is based on the WPF TabControl (for the display of LayoutAnchorable and LayoutDocument controls you'll see a different inheriting TabControl class here).

A not so well known fact about the WPF TabControl is that it is virtualizing its children by default. Virtualization means here that views are loaded and unloaded everytime the users switches from one tab to the other (to optimize memory usage but requiring quick load/unload implementations).

You can read this issue (and the referenced PR) to understand a solution that solves this particular problem.