Question

Inside a WinForms application what is the best way to handle re-sizing controls to match based on screen resolution and maximizing and re-sizing the window. I have 3 columns that are set like this. LABEL TEXTBOX in each column. You could count that as 6 columns. I have tried anchoring to the right but the problem there is the textbox in column 1will overlap the next 2 columns. I have also tried docking but that does not seem to do the trick. Is there any easy way of doing this?

Answer 1

TL;DR: You can’t without manually coding resizing logic. As a side note, you probably shouldn’t be trying to do this.

In traditional WinForms there is no automatic way to my knowledge without rolling your own solution. Sean87 suggested the AutoScaleMode property, but while it is then automatic it doesn’t support auto-sizing by resolution. It gives an option for scaling based on Font size settings in Windows or the DPI setting. Neither of these are directly changed when simply changing the screen resolution and, honestly, most typical users (and even probably power users) probably never modify the DPI or font size settings.

Besides, the whole point, from a basic user perspective, of increasing screen resolution is to give more virtual desktop “space” to place application windows in. True, most monitors are LCD-based now and thus have native resolutions that make changing this around mostly a thing of the CRT past. But still, the act of buying a new, larger monitor would let a typical user increase this virtual screen space so that they could see more windows on the screen simultaneously. An application that always maintains the same relative size to the screen resolution would be quite uncommon I think and goes against the expectations of most users, including even us advanced developer users.

Typically, you are to code your application to adjust its contents intelligently and usefully if the window is resized, but generally you defer to the user for managing that as it is their machine and their preference (think of it as the “my house, my rules” principle). This is also why most (all?) applications don’t change window positions except when directly manipulated by the user (via dragging the window frame and such). In fact, all of this likely explains why Microsoft chose not to include any automatic sizing rule based on resolution.