I have a base form in my application, that I use the derive other forms from. This all works well, except that whenever I use the visual editor to change a derived form, the locations and sizes of widgets are b0rked.
Buttons move outside of the form, widgets become larger than the form, etc.
It only happens to widgets that are anchored right and bottom.
How can I prevent this?
I'm new in C#, and I'm trying to use a design I made in a form and put it inside the other one. In Java this is possible with Scene builder. You just press include and choose your FXML file. Is there any way to do that in Visual Studio??
You can do this.
The word is User Control. Drag and drop everything to your newly created User Control , then after you made it, you can choose it later from the Tool box in Visual Studio, and also can use Drag and drop your User Control like any other tool to existing forms.
You are probably looking for UserControl.
Is there any way to do that in Visual Studio??
Yes there is, you can use a UserControl if you are targeting Winform. Similar exists for WPF as well.
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.
I've created Windows Form Application for Visual Studio 2010 with C# so that I can make the form execute SQL statements from my Database. I've looked through several tutorials and examples and many of them include a toolbox for adding options to the form. I do not have this form about creating or resetting Visual Studio, and I have no Idea where it can be found. At this point my only options are coding each "thing" i want on the form one by one but for time constraints I can't really do this. Can anyone tell me how I can get or find this toolbox of controls?
To open the toolbox, go to View -> Toolbox. Or you can use the Ctrl-W, X shortcut.
You must have a Form to place your controls on. Make sure you add a new Form to your project, then double click on it to view the blank form. Using the toolbox, you can drag and drop new controls onto your form.
Try Ctrl+Alt+X to bring up the Toolbox.
Or go to View menu and select "Toolbox".
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.