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.
Related
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?
Here's a complete simple case:
I created a UserControl. And added a Button on it Anchored top-right.
I Dock.Filled the UserControl in Form1.
The Button is not in the correct place when executing (though it is in the Designer).
Screenshots:
UserControl Designer:
Form Designer:
Executing:
Executing, resized. As you can see, that doesn't help:
I tried changing my computer's text size from 125% to 100% but that didn't help either. Windows 10, VS 2017, .Net 4.7.1. I also tried setting the UserControl's Dock in its Load and ParentChanged event handlers, and its constructor. No change.
So how do I get the button to stay anchored?
EDIT (it seems to be somehow related to text size being different than 100%)
After a lot of fiddling I see now that after I change to 100% size text (In the Settings app under System-Display. Including logging off and on), clean and rebuild the solution, and then change back to 125% it works for some time. I can't find the exact limit for that.
#ispiro, could you please try to disable DPI awareness on your VisualStudio process and see if it helps. Here is a blog post that specifies the registry key to set:
https://code4ward.net/2016/11/29/visual-studio-winforms-designer-on-highdpi/
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.
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.
So I've been coding a program for a little over a month now, and I've encountered a problem that I have no idea how to tackle. For a while now, I've always been confused when I opened up my program on other computer, and my window size was different. I chalked it up to a different resolution, and figured the problem would be easy to solve later. Then I imported a custom font to my program, and was confused when I noticed the letters where not clear and where blurry. I figured that this was something caused by my specified font size that I was using, and left it as is. Today however, as I was doing some testing I was annoyed by the blurry text enough to go and search online for the problem and solution, only to find out my problem lay within my DPI settings (125% on the computer I had mostly programmed on.)
I have no idea what I can do about this. I started programming a little while ago, and it was hard enough figuring out how to get the custom text working, but I just have no idea where to take this.
I've been coding this program in Visual Studio C# 2010 since it's the only version I've got that won't expire, so I can't use anything that might be in the 2011 or 2012 version.
All I want is for objects to be on the same place on one computer as another with a different DPI. Is there a very simple step-by-step tutorial somewhere that I can read or watch to figure this out?
This code snipshet worked perfectly for me.
http://urenjoy.blogspot.it/2008/11/make-resolution-independent-windows-app.html
(Using Visual Studio Express 2013)
It is required that windows app should have same layout at different resolutions means there should be no effect on layout of app on changing resolution. Here are the steps to do this.
Use table layout panel
Drag control in cell of tablelayoutpanel and set anchor and dock property.
Set rowspan and colspan properties of dragged control to merge cells
Set margin and padding of dragged control with respect to cell.
drag all controls and follow same steps, complete design using tablelayoutpanel
Now set all columns and rows size of tablelayoutpanel = autosize (or in %)
Set tablelayoutpanel properties autosize = true,autosizemode = grow and shrink
Set Forms properties autosize = true,autosizemode = grow and shrink
Run windows app If your windows app opens in maximum state then set tablelayoutpanel dock property =fill.