Question

My group is building an editor-type app in WPF. One thing we noticed is that on my WinXP machine, running with the “windows classic style” theme, the text on buttons is fits fine. However on my friend’s machine, who’s running with the “windows xp style” theme, the font size is bigger so text on buttons get clipped at the bottom.

Is there a way to handle this nicely, like automatically resizing controls to fit the text?

I hesitate to manually resize the button to fit his layout as anyone else can have totally different settings through the Display Properties and Accessibility Options.

Thanks!

Answer 1

A WPF button will automatically resize to fit the content that it has been given, however it will only do this when it is inside a container that does not enforce size and its size has not been set manually. To prove this mess around with the font size in the following code snippet:

<Grid>
    <Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
        <ColumnDefinition Width="*"/>
        <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto"/>
        <ColumnDefinition Width="*"/>
    </Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
    <Grid.RowDefinitions>
        <RowDefinition Height="*"/>
        <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/>
        <RowDefinition Height="*"/>
    </Grid.RowDefinitions>
    <Button
        Grid.Column="1"
        Grid.Row="1"
        FontSize="24"
        Content="QWERTY"/>
</Grid> 

I guess that your buttons haven’t resized because you have constrained them. To fix this you need to decide how you want them to resize (which can be very complicated when elements would overlap if they just grew blindly) and if none of the supplied panel types perform the growth behaviour that you are looking for then you may need to write your own that does.