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C# WinForms Panel Child Positioning Being Very Wonky?

Here is the problem. If you dynamically place controls in a panel, it works fine, but only until the vertical scrollbar appears. Once there is enough content for this to happen, it starts positioning controls nonsensically.
In my window, you can click a button to add another row of controls inside the panel, which represent options for an item in a list. If you scroll the vertical scrollbar on the panel all the way down and click the button again, the new row of controls will be positioned below the bottom edge of the panel out of view. If you scroll down, there is a huge gap between the new row and the previous row of controls. This should not happen. The positioning code is working flawlessly, as proven by debug output. As far as I can tell, the problem is the stupid anchoring system, however disabling anchoring on these controls does not fix the problem as one might expect. Instead, it just makes it position them wrong in a different manner. This makes no sense at all, and is super annoying!
I tried disabling Autoscroll in code before controls are added to the panel. No change. So I modified that code to disable both the vertical scroll bar and Autoscroll and set the scrollbar to not visible before controls are added. No change again, except that the now disabled vertical scrollbar still manages to appear usable when there is enough content in the panel in spite of it being disabled and set not visible!? That's not supposed to happen when I disabled and made it invisible! With anchoring disabled on the controls being added to the panel and once the vertical scrollbar has appeared, clicking the button to add a few more rows of controls now causes them to be indented a bit for no reason and positioned overlapping each other a bit vertically! It's as if the coordinate system in the panel has somehow arbitrarily changed, because of the presence of a vertical scrollbar and anchoring being disabled on the controls? The debug code shows that the controls are all being placed at correct coordinates, yet they appear positioned very wrongly. So my code is working perfectly, and therefore something else is the problem here.
Everything behaves exactly as expected up until the vertical scrollbar appears. This is so bizarre. Does anyone have any idea what on earth is going on with this stuff? Apparently it is far easier to make it do stupid stuff than to get it working properly.

Thanks again! I got it working. I went with TaW's solution first since it seemed like the simplest solution. Incidentally, I already tried TaW's approach days ago when I was fighting with it, but I had naturally subtracted the AutoScrollPosition value rather than add it, because I didn't expect it to be a negative value!
It seems very odd that control positioning is relative to the current AutoScrollPosition, as absolute coordinates seems like a much more natural, intuitive approach than having negative numbers. I guess that would make it slightly harder to place a control in the currently visible area, but I suppose that's not a big deal as most scrollable interfaces are probably initialized ahead of time and don't need to do that anyway.

Stretching controls to take full screen

I am making a video game. I need that it will be available at full screen mode, and with different resolutions.
I already know how to make application maximized and how to remove the built-in user interface, that is not the problem.
The problem is, that when I run it in full mode, all controls simply take the top-left corner, leaving the remaining space empty.
What I want, that controls would be spread evenly across the screen, with new coordinates and sizes, but same proportions.
I tried using anchoring. It works, but only when there is just one control. When there are more controls, and in my menu bar there are 12, and I try using anchoring, they are stretched, but put on top of each other.
Is there a way to get the right result? If so, can you please help me?
Thank you in advance,
Evgenie

Use TableLayoutPanel, anchor it to the left, right and bottom of the form, set ColumnCount=3, RowCount=1, edit column sizes in the Columns property, then drop buttons into corresponding cells and align them using their Dock, Anchor and Padding properties.

There is 'Dock' property for controls. You can add controls to a TabaleLayoutPanel and set the Dock property to DockStyle.Fill.

some ways i remember through which you can achieve it
Dock - MSDN link
Anchor - MSDN link
programitically setting the location according to the screen resolution ration

Resolution for full screen WPF application

Following the guide here, I have created a full-screen WPF application. But I met a problem: the various size & resolution of screens. For example, I want to put several sprites on the screen as buttons; but they are located at different positions in each screen, and even different to what shown in the XAML designer.
I have searched all over without a clue got. How can I fix this problem? (to make the buttons appears the exact place (in the center), and better, help the xaml designer reflect exactly what will happens when the program is running). Any help will be appreciated.
UPDATE: I'm defining my page as a Canvas inside the Window element. Actually I like Canvas more, cause I can easily put my sprites anywhere, not like a grid.

In general, you should not use pixel values in WPF.
Instead, you should layout your content in <Grid>s with rows and columns, and it will automatically expand to fill the screen (based on the alignments and row / column definitions).

Avoid using the canvas. Also, do not rely too much on the designer to build your layout. Using Grids, Stackpanels and/or Dockpanels will give much better results (and scale when resizing your window). For example, if you use only the designer and drag-and-dropp all your elements, the designer often puts huge margins a bit randomly and this will not always scale properly if you resize your window.

scroll bar TableLayoutPanel c#

I have a TableLayoutPanel that has several TableLayoutPanels inside it. The amount changes dynamically and will almost always be too many to be able to fit inside the form.I need it to have a scroll bar so I can view the entire component.
I have tried setting the autoscroll property on the main panel to true and docking it and/or setting a maximum size. What the controler does instead, is to try and fit ALL of the Panel inside the form therefore changing the size of its inside components and squeezing them all together instead of creating a scroll bar to scroll through my Panel.
Do you guys know what I might be doing wrong?
Thanks.
Jose
PS: I am using VS 2010

I had the same issue one day and found out that the problem was that I had a "MinimumSize" set to the TableLayoutPanel. That caused the control to keep a minimum height no matter what the Dock and/or Anchor constraints, preventing the AutoScroll feature to work properly. Since that feature is based on a simple check on the Y coordinates of all children controls of a control against that control's height, the scrollbar was not appearing despite the fact the the TableLayoutPanel's child controls were "disapearing" out of sight due to its parent control clip area.
So in other words, check the MinimumSize property of TableLayoutPanel and make sure it's empty.

Maybe this will help.
if it still doesn't work, try put a panel and then put the tableLayoutPanel into that panel. Set to true the autoScroll property of the panel.

I had the same thing happen on my project. All my controls were squished inside the TableLayoutPanel. In my case, I was rendering many of the controls as ColumnStyle.Percent. Switching this to ColumnStyle.Autosize was the fix I needed.
I assume you've set these properties as well, but just in case my TableLayoutPanels also use the following settings:
AutoSize = true;
AutoSizeMode = AutoSizeMode.GrowAndShrink;
AutoScroll = true;

Late answer, but I've been fighting with a complex layout recently and was looking for a solution to get my scrolling working on a screen with far too many fields. Honestly, better design should avoid this problem 99% of the time but sometimes your hands are just tied.
The Problem
The problem seems to be that if you're nested too deeply with multiple grids, groups, and panels they stop reporting properly to parent controls that their contents have overflown the size of the current screen. Actually, the problem is probably that the controls are all set to dock fill and do fit within their parent control, so the top level control doesn't know that the contents of its great-great-great-great-grandchild controls don't fit.
Solution
The trick to fix this seems to be manually forcing the top most panel to scroll at a certain minimum size:
MainPanel.AutoSize = true;
MainPanel.AutoScrollMinSize = new Size(400, 500);

TableLayoutPanel scrolling is full of bugs.
The solution to make it work correctly is here.

C# Containers -- Filling a Space Vertically on Resize

I'm new to C# and I've been working on a small project to get the feel with Visual Studio 2008. I'm designing the GUI in C#, and I have a TabControl with three GroupBoxes. These three GroupBoxes are anchored to the left and right of the screen and work perfectly when resized horizontally.
I would like these three boxes to take up 33% of the height of the screen, and gracefully resize. I've tried messing around with anchoring, but I can't seem to find the answer. I've also been searching for something similar, but unfortunately, searching for positioning containers yields all CSS and HTML stuff.
This seems like a pretty common thing to do, but I can't seem to find an easy to way to do it. If someone could point me in the right direction, I'd greatly appreciate it.
Thanks!

Try out the TableLayoutPanel. I believe it does exactly what you want. It allows you to define columns and rows within its area, specifying their width (for columns) and height (for rows) in percentages or pixels. You can then drop a group box into each cell and set its Dock property to Fill, and it will nicely resize along with the cell when the TableLayoutPanel resizes (which can be easily achieved by using docking or anchoring).

This is really a shot in the dark but maybe you could try using split-panels ?
Edit: I've just checked in Visual Studio and I think the TableLayoutPanel might do what you want.
Edit2: dang, beaten to the punch :)

Handle the form's Resize event: Add code to compute the new size/position of the controls in there. Beware to interferences with the controls' Anchor property. You may have to Anchor to None and compute left and right position yourself as well.
Since you're learning, I guess you prefer not to receive a full solution but rather a direction. No code from me then ;-)