I've got a UI with a fairly standard look and feel. It has a column of icons on the left side which when clicked open a different user control on the right side. Currently I'm using separate controls for the selection icons and the usercontrol containment. I'm having strange focus issues that I am tired of trying to mitigate and am wondering if I could style a tabcontrol to look like my UI (under the assumption a tabcontrol would not have focus issues when navigating tabs).

Here is a screenshot of the basic UI. The styling is mostly about how to get the tabcontrols page selection to look like my column of icons. Anyone want to throw their hat in the ring as to how I might accomplish this with a tabcontrol? My xaml is pretty weak at this point.