Is there an easy way to grow / zoom a VB.NET application and all controls within it to fill a larger screen resolution (or must I adjust each form element individually)?
NOTE: Adjusting the resolution back is not a permanent (or preferred) option in this case.
Please don't design your forms so they always fill the screen. Your customer has bought that nice expensive monitor to see more windows, not more of your form.
A well designed form is otherwise always resizable. Use the Anchor and Dock properties, TableLayoutPanel and FlowLayoutPanel to ensure that your controls move and size themselves properly. If your customer wants it big, she'll just click the Maximize button.
Related
So, I am kind of asking a question for a hypothetical situation here.
I am producing a Windows Form App made to show multiple windows of data on the screen at the same time. To accomplish this, I have decided to put a Table Layout Panel in the main form to act as a container for all of the data windows I will open.
The width and height of each cell of the Table Layout Panel will change depending on how many windows are open. For example, if just one window is open, it takes up 100% of the width and height of the container area. Alternatively if 3 windows are open, all the windows will have a size equal to 50% of the container's width and height.
Now let's assume each of these Windows have 20 different control elements, which are all used to help the user search through the data shown in each window. Additionally, all of these elements dynamically resize and relocate themselves as the dimensions of the window they are in change.
With all of these moving elements, when a screen is added or removed it can be assumed that there will be a good deal of glitching going on on the screen that may alarm the user. Thus we get to my question.
Is there a way to 'pause' the display of a Windows Form Application so that the user doesn't see everything on change modifying itself? I can't seem to find anything like while looking online so that is why I am asking here.
I created a winform application. The size of each screen is 1361, 768 in pixels. This worked great for larger screens and/or laptops. But now I have to move my application to 10inch screen tablets, which means my application does not fit.
I have never had to deal with this issue before, how can auto adjust each form size and adjust all of the controls and panels when viewing on smaller screens?
I am using VS 2012.
Making forms fully scalable in WinForms is possible, but it takes a bit of work. The good news is that most of this work is done at design-time, arranging the controls properly so that everything is done for you automatically by the framework. It's drudgery, but it isn't difficult. Rejoice that you don't have to write the scaling code by hand, form-by-form, like you did with VB 6.
There are four fundamental properties that you will need to acquaint yourself with:
Anchor
Dock
Margin
Padding
The last two should be quite familiar web developers who know CSS—they do the same thing here. Padding controls the inner margin around a control, while margin controls the outer margin. You will need to set these correctly to ensure that your controls can "breathe", because the automatic scaling code is just going to jam them up against one another.
The "standard" margins around a control in a Windows desktop application are approximately 12–15 pixels. You should make sure that you leave at least this much room. Then add additional margins/padding as you see fit to separate things. I keep these layout specifications bookmarked for reference. This is another good reference.
The next step is to instruct the layout manager how you want the controls to be arranged and resized. The key to this is to think in terms of container controls and child controls. The form itself is a container control, and you can set its child controls to either Anchor or Dock within its boundaries. One or more of those child controls can itself be a container control, and its child controls can be Anchored or Docked within its borders. The nesting is virtually unlimited, but for your own sanity and reasonable redraw performance, you'll want to keep it to a reasonable minimum.
A good way of doing this is to use the two provided invisible layout helpers, FlowLayoutPanel and TableLayoutPanel. Personally, I don't find the former very useful very often, at least not for standard Windows applications. But the TableLayoutPanel is invaluable.
Generally what I will do is fill my entire form with a TableLayoutPanel (margins = 0, dock = fill). Then I will add individual controls (or sometimes another nested TableLayoutPanel) to its cells. Those child controls will have their margins set appropriately, and will have either their Anchor or Dock properties set, depending on whether I want that control to have a fixed size or resize dynamically.
Before you get the hang of how these properties interact and how it all works, you'll probably need to play around with your layout a bit. Make a backup of your forms and then just dig in. Or, you might find it easier to start designing each form from scratch (you can still copy-and-paste individual controls in order to preserve their other properties). Eventually, it will all start making sense to you, and you'll be up and going in a jiffy.
The great thing is, once this is all set up, all you have to do is ensure that your form is resizable. Then, whether the user manually resizes it or uses the maximize/restore button, it'll automatically fill their screen size. This also works well for all DPI settings, which is another common Achilles' heel of WinForms devs.
Try to get the resolutions variables to adjust your screens, there is an answer to get these variables using the Screen class
Getting Screen Resolution
DevExpress has a great control call the Layout Control. This control helps to maintain consistent whitespace between controls as the form is resized. It does take a little study to use the control effectively but once you understand how to use this control the results are consistent and you are able to speed through form design.
I was searching google for a way to size the form and the controls with it and came across something that mentioned Control.scale. How do I use the control.scale method to size everything down to the way I want it.
Also, is there a way I can zoom the form out in the designer. I want to create a 1280X800 form, but my screen is 1024X768. I want to be able to zoom out to see the entire form wile still having it's size be 1280X800.
You can use tablelayout panel in order to fit your form in all resolutions.similary a property called anchor, which is also need to be assigned for the controls inside tablelayout panel according to your requirement [top,bottom,left,right] to achieve the same.
By the way you have to use percentage for setting the column's width and row's height in that.
Simply, this way of designing is called as fluid designing.
Table layout panel
Very weird situation going on with a FlowLayoutPanel...
I have been dynamically adding user controls to my panel. This user control has a height of 105. If I have my FlowLayoutPanelwidth to only show 1 "column" of controls, it will only display 296 of them. The rest of the controls are grayed out at the bottom of the flowlayoutpanel. If I widen the flp to allow 2 "columns" of controls, I can see 592 of them, with the remainder grayed out at the bottom. I have gone in and resized the user control to make it shorter in height, which works in some respects (i.e. it works when I have two columns, but not just 1), and can go forward with this work-around.
So, I guess my question is, why does the FlowLayoutPanel behave in this fashion? It seems (based on what I saw) that there is a limit to how much data the FLP will show at one time.
Your comment just reminded me that when you're adding many controls to any container it is a good idea to do this:
YourPanel.SuspendLayout();
// populate panel with controls
YourPanel.ResumeLayout(false);
This in effect stops the container (panel) from re-rendering itself every time you add a control until you're done adding controls. In the very least your panel creation will be smoother and faster. Not sure if this might fix your issue or avoid the need for a hack with PerformLayout.
If you look at your Form's designer file you will actually see this in action in the InitializeComponent function.
I have designed a form in VB.NET. At design time I have placed two buttons on it.
When I run it, the form size looks smaller and the buttons I have placed at the bottom are not visible. Also the alignment of the text and picture box is also different from what I set at design time.
Computer at which I am running the form is using a different resolution.
change the properties (F4) of the buttons: in ANCHOR put Bottom, Right
your buttons will be tied to the bottom and the right of the screen, instead of to the top, left, which is the default.
Grab the screen size at runtime with
Dim screen as System.Windows.Forms.Screen = System.Windows.Forms.Screen.PrimaryScreen
and using a scale factor depending on the current size (in design), scale the window to match. Check the coordinates of the buttons by hand to make sure they are not outside of the visible portion of the window.
You may not have to leave this feature in if you can debug it to the point that you know the exact resolution that you need.