In my Winforms application I have a toolbar that contains many items (buttons with icon 32px, labels and comboboxes).
I decided to set the Toolstrip.LayoutStyle property from the default HorizontalStackWithOverflow to Flow in order to allow the toolbar split automatically on more rows when user have a very low resolution monitor or he/she resize the window.
The problem is that all labels and comboboxes are aligned to the top of Toolstrip when I change the LayoutStyle.
Does exist a property or any other workaround that allow me to center them vertically?
I think I see what you mean, the label isn't as tall as, say, a button. And it gets aligned improperly with LayoutStyle = Flow. Ugh. You can work around it by changing the Padding property of the label. To do this properly, you should however do this in the form's OnLoad() method override, the label will be taller when you run on a machine with a higher video DPI setting.
Related
I have a Winform I want to resize. Not after launching; I want to resize it in the designer by dragging the edges.
I am aware that I can change the size manually in the form properties. This is not what I want to do. I want to quickly size the default size of the form with my mouse.
The problem appears to be that I cannot grab the edges of the form for some reason. I repeat, this is NOT DURING RUNTIME. It is not that I have disabled/enabled Autosize/Resizing.
It's almost like the edge grabs are a single pixel wide and I just can't hit it. I don't know. I've looked for accessibility settings. The last thing I want to do is reinstall MSVS. It's just maddening.
I've attached a photo. The little boxes on the bottom, right, and bottom-right corner are my targets.
you can try to click the form title before resizing. I think you may have a panel (or any container control) which is full docked in the form, that's why when you click the form body, you selected the panel instead of the form.
Another issue that I encountered was the windows font size was set to 120% (or more), so go to windows display setting and set the font size to 100%.
How to run or adjust Windows application efficiently in any screen resolution in C# 4.0?
I have done it in 1600 x 1200 resolution but if I try in lower resolutions only some part of the forms are visible.
How to solve this problem? I have searched a lot and got to know about Anchor & Dock will be useful but also to came to know that these should be used from the beginning of designing but I have completed my application while this resolution is now causing the problem when I install the application in any system
The quick and dirty method of making sure your controls remain visible would be to place a Panel on the form, set Dock = Fill and AutoScroll = True, then place every other control in your form inside it. Your controls won't get cut off, but your program won't win any awards for asthetics. If the program is brand new, that's really not the way you want to start things off.
You could redesign it to make use of Anchors and Docking, as you mentioned. You could also place items such as a row of Button controls or a series of TextBox controls in a FlowLayoutPanel, which will take care of repositioning them as you resize the form.
But if adjusting for screen resolutions is important to you, a better way would have been to use WPF from the start. Controls are automatically resized and repositioned as needed, based on their container control.
The real question should be:
How do I want the controls to resize themselves with their parent?
The answer is that you need to specify anchors. Anchors are used to tell your controls how they should react on resize, and what the concerns should be.
Lets say you have a form with two [Cancel] and [OK] buttons. They are usually seen fit at the bottom right of your window. But the default Anchor property is set to Top, Left, so on your form's resize, they stick to the Top, Left corner where they belong according to the default settings. This won't be any trouble if your maximize your form, thus you'll have your button probably in the middle of the screen. But at least, you will see every controls adequately.
But what if resize your form smaller and smaller? Do you still want them to stick at the Top, Left, or Bottom, Right would be more useful? My guess is that you should set the Anchor property to Bottom, Right, for those two.
This might come in handy to have different Anchor property settings depending on how you want your control to react to your form resize. Let's take three TextBox controls aligned horizontally with each other. Perhaps your longer field will be your object Description property located on horizontal-center of your form. Then, when you risize, you have to think what would make more sense on resize. If it is to make it longer on resize in order to fill your form width with all your control, then perhaps you want the DescriptionTextBox to get wider and wider, and the contraray should also be true, on form's resize, you probably want this field to be resized smaller too. Then, to make this happen, you have to set the Anchor property to Left, Right, so that the edge of your DescriptionTextBox control remains at the same very distance of your form's edge at any time.
Another thing is of concern in case of resizing to smaller window, is its MinimumSize property. One shall agree that there is use to have a form of size 34x34 pixels. So, setting your MinimumSize property to a certain size which makes sens for the form to exist, you will avoid display glitches of controls getting one over another.
For more details on the Anchor property: Control.Anchor Property
For more details on the MinimumSize property: Control.MinimumSize Property
A disclaimer first! This might be a very fundamental question, but I have started learning Winforms Application Development on my own (.net 3.5,C#), and I have this resizing question.
I am developing a small Winforms application that has a standard tab control (along with many other controls) placed in the form. (It has 5 TabPages)
The AutoScroll property for the TabPage has been set to “True”. On reading up what I got to understand is that this will enable the scrollbars to show up at run time while resizing. i.e if the height of the form is reduced it will cause the vertical scrollbar to show up within the TabPage.
While the application is running, what I noticed is that if I reduce the height of the form using the little double headed arrow, the scroll bar does not stay on top, i.e if I adjust the height from below, the bottom end of the scrollbar is no longer there. More precisely I am just looking for a way to keep both ends of the scrollbar on top within a TabPage when the form containing the Tab control is resized.
It sounds like the problem is that the tabbed control will show scrollbars and may well autosize, but you haven't told the form what to do.
You might want to look at the 'Dock' property of controls, which causes a control to fill a specific area of the form (or other parent control), no matter what it is resized to.
So in winforms, every dropdown combobox has this little arrow thingy to the right that tells the user it's a dropdown, kinda like this:
Now how do I figure out how wide that is in pixels? Reason is, I'm using ControlDrawToBitmap, this doesn't draw the text properly for the combo boxes, and I can redraw the contents, I just whack some of the arrows (which are drawn properly).
First idea that comes to mind: Check to see if the combobox button width tracks with the scrollbar width. The scrollbar width can be modified in user preferences. Use GetSystemMetrics() API to get the width of the various scrollbar pieces. If you change your system scrollbar width and it does not affect the size of a normal combobox, then ignore this.
Second idea: use the edit control's formatting rect to find out what the edit control thinks is the usable display area (minus the combo box). See EM_GETRECT in MSDN.
However, it sounds like this is just a hack workaround for your real problem: If you could get the controls to draw correctly to bitmap, then you wouldn't need this hackery.
I calculated it to be 9 pixels wide in photoshop
I'm developing an app for Windows Mobile 5.0 and above, with C# and .NET Compact Framework 2.0 SP2.
I have a WinForm with two panels inside (upperPanel and bottomPanel). I want that upperPanel always fill 2/3 of form's height, and bottomPanel fills 1/3 of form's height. Both panels will fill completly form's width.
I've used this:
upperPanel.Dock = Fill;
bottomPanel.Dock = Bottom;
But upperPanel fills the form completly.
How can I do this? I want, more o less, the same gui on differents form factors and on landscape or protrait mode.
Thank you.
What you need to do is to put the bottom panel on first and set its Dock property to Bottom. Then set the panel's height to be 1/3 of the form's height. Finally, add a second panel and set its Dock property to Fill. The key here is that you want to add the control that will fill the remaining area to be added last. Alternatively, you can play around with the Bring to Front and Send to Back commands in Visual Studio to get the designer to cooperate.
You may also need to hook the OnSizeChanged event for the form and re-set the height of the bottom panel to account for layout changes. It's been a little while since I did compact framework programming, so I'm not sure.
Right click on the upperPanel and select Bring To Front. However, I don't think this will give you the result you want. When you resize, the bottom panel will remain the same height, while the upper panel will stretch to fill the form.
Using your docking settings, with this code might do the trick:
protected override void OnSizeChanged(EventArgs e)
{
base.OnSizeChanged(e);
this.bottomPanel.Height = Convert.ToInt32((double)this.Height / 3.0);
}
Set both panels to "not anchored". That is: Remove Dock-Value and clear the Anchor property. Then, move the controls so they are sized the way you'd like them to be sized.
After that, upon resizing the form, they should resize relatively.
EDIT
Oops, just tried it and sure it doesn't work. I mixed this up with a solution that automatically keeps controls centered within the window...
Well, I'd guess you then have to create a handler for the form's Resize event and manually align the controls after the form has been resized.
Go to Tools, Other Windows, Document Outline. Find the two panels, and swap the order of them. The control that has DockStyle.Fill has to come first for it to be docked correctly. (or last.. never sure which one it is, but it is one of them :p)
This won't solve the always 1/3 and 2/3 issue though... cause the bottom panel will have a fixed height (unless I am mistaken). I think maybe the TableLayoutPanel supports this though...
Update: As noted in the comments, that panel doesn't exist in the compact framework. So, I suppose the easiest solution to this problem would then try to use the docking, but update the height of the bottom panel whenever the size of the form changes.
If you want this to work perfectly you'll need to add some code to the Resize event of the Form which then specifically works out the relative sizes and places the controls in the correct place after a resize.
If you're not worried about losing precision and the forms aren't going to move much you can avoid this by using some relatively smart anchoring. Essentially you're going to have to select a "grower" (the part of the form that gets bigger, the bigger the form gets). In this scenario I would probably anchor the top part to Top | Left | Right and the bottom part to Top | Left | Right | Bottom. This would mean that the lower part of the form will get bigger if the form is expanded. In most cases this is acceptable. If it isn't use the Resize event and some code.
The easiest way to do this is to nest panels. Just set up panels for top bottom and fill. Then use panels within those panels to do the same. The only issues I've had therein are datagrid resizing, which is always a pain anyway. in that case, you have to use some code to resize the datagrid control on the form resize event.
I would like to add a point to #jasonh answer.
For the panel that occupies 2/3 of the form, you will have to set the AutoScroll property of the panel to true.
This will enable the panel to display scroll when the control size exceed the visibility to the user and also ensure the visibility of the smaller panel which is 1/3 of the forms height.
You can get the required design by using nested panels along with few setting with Anchoring and Docking Properties.Follow the following steps:
1) Add the Form and put a Panel1 on it. Set its Dock Property as 'Fill' and ResizeMode as 'Grow&Shrink'.
2) Add Second panel2 and set its Dock Property to 'Bottom', Set the Height and set the Anchor property to 'Top,Left'.
3)Add Third panel and set its Dock Property to 'None', Set the Height and set the Anchor property to 'Top,Bottom,Left,Right'.
Save and Compile. Now all the panels Would maintain their relative Positioning With resizing.