I have a customer where my application's forms are shown in a different layout than they suppose to be. Please see the attached images.



My customer and I are using Windows Vista 64bits with a screen resolution of 1920x1200.



Is there a form's property or something I have to setup to make sure the form's will display as they should?

BTW, I am not using any autosizing or anchor properties.

Edhy Rijo

My guess (and it is just that ) has to do with the DPI setting being different. This is the kind of stuff WPF is supposed to be better at. On the client's box, try right clicking the shortcut that starts your app, properties/compatibility and check Disable Display Scaling on High DPI settings and see if that helps. If so you at least know that's the problem and can ask somebody who knows a lot more about it than I do how you can check for that and set it programmatically

Edhy,

Most likley this is due to one of the following things: Autoscaling or a non-distributed font.  The DPI resolution will always mess with you as Charles pointed out.  But in this case, it could be the Autoscaling on the form:

This has bitten me before as well.  You can adjust this to prevent auto-scaling altogether.  The second issue may be if you are developing with a font that you are not distrubuting.  In these cases, the default system font will be used which can cause these types of issues.  For example, we use Calibri and Segoe UI in our medical application a lot.  However, these are distributed only with Vista machines which means that we had to take this into account on our installation.

Hope this helps.

Charles / Trent,

Thanks for the reply.



Sure it did help. I have been able to duplicate this situation under Virtual PC, and yes the customer's computer is using a Larger scale of 120 DPI.

I tried setting the form's AutoScaleMode property to "None" but that did not make a difference, then I played changing the label fonts to Segoe UI and setting Anchor properties for the ThemedGroupBoxes and for now that gives me an acceptable solution, but this could become messy having to do all this for all forms.

Is there a way to set the default font for SF TextBoxes?

Edhy Rijo

Did you try disabling the autoscaling on the client's box for your app? The impression I got from reading WPF stuff was that as long as your app was winforms and used GDI you wouldn't get accurate rendering if let the OS autoscale.

Well, the first thing is to determine what you are fighting.  Most environments do not set their DPI above 96 DPI, however, if this is going to be common place for you, then you may need to address this in a base class situation.  If you recall in training, we suggest that you create your base UI controls that at the very minimum inherit off of the SF classes (even if nothing is added to the logic) for situations just like this.  If you haven't done this, it isn't that big of a deal as you can do a mass replace to change the textbox types on your forms.

If you see some early threads on the forum, we had one person who wanted to run their desktop in 120 DPI.  This did throw off some of the SF dialogs.  I know that there are some that probably still need to be changes, but we addressed all of this through the autoscaling settings versus on a control by control basis.

Well in fact this is the first customer I got with a 120 DPI and it is due to is large monitor which came preset with that DPI, so I wouldn't be surprise of finding many more customer with the low prices of large screen monitor today.



I am trying to handle this setting AutoScaleMode = DPI and using the Segoe UI font and was able to get a decent autoscale of the forms, but still this will take more trial and error and since this project is to be use by many customers I have no choice other than keep trying.



About subclassing, I have done that with the forms and BOs and some Currency textboxes, but as you suggested I should at least include the labels which are always used in all applications.

Edhy Rijo

Hi Charles,

Yes I tried disabling the shortcut "Disable display scaling on high DPI settings" but that did not have any effect and I mix and match this setting with different setting in the form's AutoScaleMode property. So this could really be a very frustrated task to keep the application in complaint with the OS DPI, based on some articles I found on the google this should be handle automatically by VB.NET, but it is not .

Edhy Rijo

Hi Edhy,

I believe that I have just encountered the same issue at a client site. I am waiting to get more info about the user's notebook configuration.

Did you end up settling on a set of standard form settings and fonts to overcome this issue?

Best regards,

Andy

Hi Andrew,
Unfortunately I did not find a good solution for this one.  In my case the problem shows up when the user change the default OS font size to 125% or more, then my application looks really bad, but to my luck also other applications like QuickBooks looks bad, so I end up taking a official support solution and tell my customers that if they change the font size, then application will not display properly, I know it is not fair, but I have not look for other reasonable solution since then.

Edhy Rijo