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Asked: 2026-06-14T02:34:26+00:00

Please see the update I have the following WPF controls. <Grid> <Label Content=Report Generator

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Please see the update

I have the following WPF controls.

<Grid>
    <Label Content="Report Generator" Margin="0,0,0,294"/>
    <TextBox Name="FilePath" Width="300" Height="25" Margin="10,30,207,264"/>
    <Button Width="75" Click="Browse" Margin="335,30,0,0" VerticalAlignment="Top" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Height="25" Content="Browse" />
    <Button Width="75" Height="25" Click="Extract" Margin="432,30,0,0" VerticalAlignment="Top" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Content="Extract" />
    <ProgressBar x:Name="ExtractBar" Margin="10,70,107,204"/>
    <Label x:Name="FirstEntityCount" Content="Number of Type1 Entities: " Margin="0,191,0,98" />
    <Label x:Name="SecondEntityCount" Content="Number of Type2 Entities: " Margin="0,226,0,65" />
</Grid>

I’ve quickly thrown this together in Visual Studio 2012 designer. The target Framework is .Net 4.5 and this is a WPF Window. It’s an addition to an existing solution.

The issue is that if I don’t remove the 3rd and 4th margins (e.g. Margin=”a,b,c,d”, setting c and d to 0) and then specifying VerticalAlignment="Top" and HorizontalAlignment="Left" the controls are cropped.

See attached image below.Missing parts of controls

I can rectify this by setting the margins to be 0 and setting the alignments but I want to know why this happens by default? I literally have just dragged and dropped. The controls appear normal in Visual Studio 2012.

Running Windows 8 RTM.

UPDATE

My question isn’t why the margins now work and why the didn’t before (I get that they seem to be set so they crop the actual control itself); I’m merely asking why this complex IDE fluffs it all up… It’s happened over 2 rebuilds…
From what I remember, it also happens in Expression Blend. I’ll double check.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    When you drag and drop from the designer, whether it be in Visual Studio or Expression blend, the designer will attempt to place the element in the exact location the control was dropped on the designer surface. When the designer places the element, margins are used to position the control relative to the containing element.

    What is typically done when dragging controls onto the design surface is to reset the margins. In Blend and VS, you can reset any attribute to their default settings by clicking the little square in the properties and selecting reset.

    Agreed that the setting of the margins by the designer is a bit of an annoyance; though, not really sure of how else this would be handled when using a visual designer to drag and drop.

    Personally, I tend to switch between hand written XAML and the designer; lately, I’ve been using Blend much more since it can control the placement of nearly any element in the XAML by using the objects and timeline panel.

    On a side note, to clean up the Blend XAML madness, install the XAML Styler extension for Visual Studio.

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