Question

I have an application that uses Windows.Forms.Panel to display a list of pictures. When the height of the panel exceeds 32767 pixels the rest of the content is simply cut off.

example:

Windows.Forms.Panel myPanel;

ArrayList pictureList;

foreach(pic in pictureList) {
    myPanel.Controls.Add(pic) // adds all the objects without complaints
}

In the example all elements are add to the panel without an error to be thrown, but after the panel has reached a size of 32767 no image is displayed anymore.

My question: Is it possible to break this limit and display more content in a panel?

I know that the approach is inconvinient in any way, but there is no time now to redesign the whole Application.

Answer 1

This is an architectural limitation in Windows. Various messages that indicate positions in a window, like WM_MOUSEMOVE, report the position in a 32-bit integer with 16-bits for the X and 16-bits for the Y-position. You therefore cannot create a window that’s larger than short.MaxValue. This isn’t exactly a real problem, nobody has a monitor that’s wider than 32,767 pixels and won’t for a long time to come.

You’ll have to do this differently. Like using Graphics.TranslateTransform() in a Paint method.