  The detailed study of vector-boson pair production processes at the LHC will
lead to a better understanding of electroweak physics. As pointed out before, a
consistent inclusion of higher-order electroweak effects in the analysis of
corresponding experimental data may be crucial to properly predict the relevant
phenomenological features of these important reactions. Those contributions
lead to dramatic distortions of invariant-mass and angular distributions at
high energies, but may also significantly affect the cross section near
threshold, as is the case e.g. for Z-pairs. For this reason, we present an
analysis of the next-to-leading-order electroweak corrections to WW, WZ and ZZ
production at the LHC, taking into account mass effects as well as leptonic
decays. Hence, our predictions are valid in the whole kinematic reach of the
LHC and, moreover, respect the spin correlations of the leptonic decay products
at NLO accuracy. Starting from these fixed-order results, a simple and
straight-forward method is motivated to combine the electroweak corrections
with state-of-the-art Monte Carlo predictions, focusing on a meaningful
combination of higher-order electroweak and QCD effects. To illustrate our
approach, the electroweak corrections are implemented in the HERWIG++
generator, and their phenomenological effects within a QCD environment are
studied explicitly.
