Can't see a button in designer - c#

I'm on Windows 10, maintaining a C# Desktop application using Visual Studio 2019, putting controls onto a Form (System.Windows.Forms.Form). I'm attempting to change an application; reworking where the controls go etc., so there is code and control design that I want to keep and put into different locations. I am using the visual designer and connecting to code using the control events (as opposed to creating the forms dynamically).
I have Document Outline visible on the left; I cut several groups of controls I intend to paste back later, so all that one particular TableLayoutPanel has in it now is two buttons. But I cannot find those buttons in the designer. I can see them in the Document Outline; they're in a TableLayoutPanel (in a group box in another TableLayoutPanel on a TabPage, etc.). When I click on a control in the Document Outline, the corresponding control is usually highlighted in the View; however, when I click on either of these buttons, nothing is highlighted in the view.
I tried resizing the Form (which determines the sizes of all these panels/tableLayoutPanels set to 'fill'); it's currently at 1367,850; one of the button locations shows as 664,752, but I don't know in what coordinate system that applies. I tried manually setting the location to 50,50 in the properties window, but it won't let me change that there.
These buttons appear at the bottom of the form; they've never appeared there, but I've noticed sometimes the designer has shown dotted-line outlines of them outside the form entirely. They appear in place when the application is run.
I've tried changing between the 100% scaling and the 125% scaling; that didn't help. For two buttons, I suppose I could delete them and recreate them, but there are many, many controls on this UI, and if there's some trick to making things appear I'd like to know about it.
Is there a trick to this that I'm missing?

Related

WPF Helper lines in Designer mode not showing any more

I have searched around using different terms, I don't know the correct name of what I search so it's hard to find something relevant about it.
In Winforms when you drag a control into a form and drag it around if there is another control you will see visible lines in the designer (snap lines I think) that are showing the alignment from the control you are dragging to the other. In WPF there was the same but I don't have it anymore and I can't find it anywhere in the tools/options. I did not change anything to my knowledge that would change that behavior.
Is it due to an update and they removed it or what happened that I don't have it anymore?

See bottom, left side of the designer. There are a couple of toggle buttons there which may be of help.

in Visual studio 2015 the designer change property, like size, of a controls in a win form

i have a windows form with a lot of controls like datagrid, panel, groupbox, tab control ecc... In VS2015 every time i open the form in design mode, the designer made some little change at size, point or location properties of some control as shown in the screenshot from the diff of svn.
screenshot of a diff
and i did not change anything only save and re-open in designer. When i do this, the designer also change the position of some block of code.
Usually i work with the *.designer.cs in read only mode, but when i have to make changes to the UI it is not possible to work in this way... so any one knows how to solve this issue?
Thanks a lot

Set Form's AutoScaleMode property to None.
Or you can use some panels to organize your controls on form, like create aTableLayoutPanel and add rows and columns and dock controls in each cell.

Tab Control in Winforms take time to load different tabs

I'm not good with customization of controls. However in my application I started using a customized tab. My customized tab didn't work. So I went on with using KRBTabControl. In my application I have used panels which are further placed in the individual tabs named Home,Reports,Settings. Everything works fine. But the issue that I face is that there is a delay in loading the controls when I click on various tabs. The controls placed inside the tab doesnt load properly.
Ex. If from Home I click to Settings. All the controls such as labels and button take a second to load. Which just seem awkward. I also tried double buffering the Form but still there is a delay. Is there a way using which I can make all the controls visible at the same time as soon as a new tab is clicked.
Any help would be really appreciated.

design panel without parent form in Visual Studio

Anyone come up with a way that I can design a panel without a form?
On the surface usercontrol doesn't seem the way to go.
Background:
I come from a text editor world and VS is new to me. We did everything with panels instead of forms. So open for learning. Specifically have a base class panel (ExtendedPanel) that defines some basic controls: Cancel, Save, Save and Close. This ExtendedPanel then will be used for ClientExtendedPanel that is tied to a bindingsouce clientBindingSource. This is all tied to my entity framework model. So I will add, edit and delete sql datarows for my Client table. If no changes have happened by Save button will not be enabled. If I make a change but hit cancel it will warn me. I've done all this before but since I left that company I don't have access to the code base and they didn't use VS (text editor only)so it wasn't really transportable anyway.
All that background so I can ask: Is usercontrol the way to go, or is there something that will allow me to visually add controls to a panel like it is a form?

Yes, a UserControl provides a form-like canvas in the designer for you to add other controls (buttons, etc).
You can do this too by inheriting a panel and writing the code to add the buttons and wire their events, etc, but you won't get the designer support.

visual studio 2005 designer moves controls and resizes Form

When i open a form in visual studio 2005 (c#) the designer automaticaly resize the form and move/resize controls without touching the designer at all. The source file is changed and when i close the designer i'm asked to save the *.cs file.
I tried to look into visual studio options without any success.
any ideas?
visual studio setup or something?
thanks,
Tal

I have been working on this problem for most of today and found some interesting things: The main source of the problem seems to be relying on anchoring. If I use docking to position my controls, instead of anchoring, my problems seem to go away. I found a couple of blog posts from 2003(!), which detail how you might use docking instead of anchoring, and explain how anchoring can break the Windows Forms designer. It seems like this problem might be over 7 years old!
Here are the posts:
http://weblogs.asp.net/rweigelt/archive/2003/09/24/28984.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/rweigelt/archive/2003/10/17/32407.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/rweigelt/archive/2003/10/23/33181.aspx

This is due to AutoScaleMode-property. Your forms have probably been designed with a different DPI or Font settings than you have now in Windows display settings. AutoScaleMode-property has 4 different possible values : Dpi, Font, Inherit or None. In Dpi or Font mode, your forms and controls will be automatically resized depending on windows display settings.
So, set the AutoScaleMode-property to None in all your forms and controls and they won't be automatically resized anymore. Try to design your forms in order to let sufficient space in every controls so that text will fit even if text size is set to 125%.

I found a work around.
not sure what happens behind but i changed my display properties. and it works fine.
here is the sequence: display propertis->settings tab->advance.
in the the advance dialog i changed the "DPI Settings" from Large (120dpi) to Normal (96 dpi)

Had the same problem with controls anchored top, left and right within complex TabControls. The visual studio forms designer was increasing the width of all nested controls each time I would open the form.
I found a simple workaround thanks to this post. I simply added a panel to each tab and set their dock property to fill. All existing controls within the tabs were moved inside those panels. This works, even if the controls are anchored top, left and right.
Works at least for Visual Studio 2013 and 2015.

This is one you should live with. Even in VS2008 such things happen from time to time. It is mostly depends on form content (controls, positions, etc), and there is no option in VS to disable such behavior.
When you open your form in designer, vs runtime rebuilds visual appearance from code behind. And sometimes it made changes at this moment. Also when you are simply adding one control to form, designer fully rebuilds codebehind and resource files. This is well known issue, and seems that MS won't fix it, because they move in WPF direction.
So several points to simplify your life:
Move to VS2008, designer were more consistent, but still shuffle controls in .designer.cs file
Place your code in one of the source repositories, so if you accidentally saved such form, you can restore it from repositary.

Setting the form Min and Max size settings to the current size was a good work around for me. This prevented VS from resizing it.

I had a trivial form with few controls on it, where the OK and Cancel at the bottom were being shifted up as soon as the form was opened in the VS2013 designer. The same behaviour was observed in VS2015.
The accepted answer here of DPI did not solve the issue for me, nor were there any issues on the size of the form/padding/margins.
Removing the controls that are shifted and adding them back into the form solved the problem for me, as suggested by ptutt here:
Visual Studio designer moving controls and adding grid columns when form is opened
While I appreciate ryantum's suggestion and links of using docking [with panels], as also referred to in the link above with Roland's blog post here https://weblogs.asp.net/rweigelt/28984, with something so trivial I'd rather just make it go away with removing/adding back in.

I found locking the controls from the format menu was a simple and effective solution. VS2013

I had this problem with VS 2015.
I used dock panels with the controls that moved unexpectedly as their childs.
By default the controls will be aligned to the left, but you can change the orientation.
My buttons stopped moving.

I had this issue, too. Every time I opened the designer, every box with anchor "right" was moved about 20 Pixels to the left. Additionally, the bottom of every box with anchor "left" was about 200 pixels outside the form.
This form has many controls and should not shrink on smaller displays, so it was set to autoscroll, the form itself was smaller in the designer than the shown minimum size (historically...). I just set the size to the minimum size so that no scroll bars appeared in the designer and the anchors worked as expected without screwing up the postitions.
I read the first post from ryantm's answer which led me to the solution. Apparently it has something to do with the order .Net executes events such as setting the size of a form.

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