Question about Screen size

[Rally2000]

This bites!
I just learned something the hard way, I just installed this program I’ve been working on onto my neighbors PC and the moment he opened it I felt about 1” tall.
The Program does not fit his screen!! Half of the buttons you can’t even see and not to mention that the graphics I used are overlapping.
(Yes there is still people that are using 15” Monitors @ 800x600)
Is there a way to fix this?? My program does not have a maximize or minimize box.
Please help!

[Lunatic3]

It would be better if you desgined for 800x600. Also you may change the size of controls according to the monitor resolution when loading the form (I don't like that personally). You should also be careful about docking and anchor.

[Mike Hildner]

Lunatic3 is absolutely correct. Unless you wish to programmatically resize and move your controls, design for the highest common denominator (not the lowest).

800 x 600 will not go away any time soon.

[Rally2000]

That sounds good but how do I design something for 800x600 on 15" Monitor or does the Monitor Size not matter??

[sw_is_great]

why should monitor size matter ?

800X600 is the resolution

[RichardAtherton]

Just jumping in on this debate.

However we are having exactly the same types of problems.

Rightly or wrongly we decided to use 1024 x 768 as are minimum monitor resolution requirements.

As you will have realised VB.net uses pixels and not twips as it screen measurement method,so if MS are right no more cycling through the controls on a form and resizing them and relocating them because they run a a different monitor resolution.

In theory that means that if you set a base resolution size, any scaling up will mean that simply you form will always fit the screen size albeit appearing slightly smaller.

Wrong, just installed on a 1920 x 1200 screen resolution noteboook and the screens are all over the place, some of them showing the symptoms of trying to fit a 1024 x 768 screen onto a 800 x 600 resolution. That is the form size exceeds the displayable area, not good when your action buttons are bottom right and can't be accessed.

In other words the form wont fit the screen and the screen resolutions appears to be all over the place, with font sizes correctly scaled but images being reduced

Notebooks in particular seem to cause more problems than monitors but with the increasing use of flat screens this is becoming a real problem.

Are we all missing something here. is there a simple solution to this or are we addressing a serious problem. I've noticed that even MS screens don't fit and scale properly.

Any input or comments would be welcomed

[Rally2000]

is that laptop you installed on a wide screen UXGA my buddy just purchased one and I’m working on a program for him as well. That is definitely something I would like to find out about.

PS: How does the DPI size fit into all off that I see that is a problem as well as screen resolution.

[RichardAtherton]

Yes it is, its from Dell from memory called an Inspiron. We all have a problem here though, we don't know enough about there tech specifications and are of course reluctant to change factory settings which we all presume have been well tested.

As syptoms, the + symbol in explorer, is tiny, the insert bar is 3 times thicker than expected, some MS admin screens do not show all of the screen and have to be relocated to work properly, scroll bars oareover sized and the up /down arrows'fuzzy'

[RichardAtherton]

follow up:

Vb .net uses DPI to scale screen resolution, VB6 uses TWIPs a different way of scaling,or more correctly screen size resolution. Don't quote me on any of the above, I am still trying to get to grips with the problem and understand the issures in addressing it. Ij ust have the very strong feeling, we are not alone.

If anyone reads this and says ah yes your fundamental mistake was to use 1024 x 768 as your base size and it should be 800 x 600, I'll accept that and redesign every sceen to fit that, but only if they can provide convincing arguments, in which case I'll create a simple screen and crystalreports app and install and test on various resolutions.But that is not the way its described in ther documentation I have read

The supposed benefits was that using Pixels, auto scaling always worked. It really does not seem to be that way. Don't take anything I am writing here as gospel as we are still trying to determine whether it's our software or hardware configurarions and whether we can adjust hardware configurations without upsetting existing applications.

To be honest we are shooting in the dark, trying to investigate problems we don't understand with knowledge we don't have.

Not very helpful I know,but hopefully any activity on this discussion will invite others to join in and maybe start to progress some ideas and who knows expose a fundamental misunderstanding that we developers have had about screen resolution

[Rally2000]

There is supposed to be a simple way to address these issues by using the “Form class's Scale method”. This is what someone replied in another forum.
It is going to take some time for me to study up on this since I am fairly new to Programming.
But I’m like you and sure would like for someone to step in and tell us a little about these issues.

[Lunatic3]

I just don't understand what you mean. To me it is quite straightforward:
First: Form AutoScale has nothing to do with resolution. If it is true the form will automatically scale itself and its controls based on the current font assigned to the form.

Second: Pixel is resolution independent. One pixel is always one pixel in each resolution. So if your control is 80x20, then it is always like that in each and every monitor, and as all the elements of the form use the same scale then their size proportion should not change in different resolutions, but the size of controls that you see do vary in each monitor with different resolution and DPI.
So if you have designed a 1000 X 700 form in 1024 x 768 and you go to a 1920 x 1200 monitor, it should be still 1000 X 700 and does not fill the whole area of the monitor. By the way did you tried your application on your own monitor with higher resolution to see the difference?

[Rally2000]

If what you are saying was true then how come “although the size of my app. was below 800 x 600” it did not fit his screen?
About it being strait forward, yes that is what I thought too. But yet I’m having problems.
Don’t get this the wrong way, it was not “that big” off an issue, I ended up making all windows a little smaller and that solved the problem, but I still don’t understand.
I have found some documentation that I’m in process of reading, maybe that will clear things up.

[Lunatic3]

Thats very strange. Can you post your code?

[Rally2000]

I need some time to check on something I may have an all together different problem now.
Something else has gone wrong, I don't think that the last time I compiled the program it compiled the way t was supped to. I may have compiled it "again" using the wrong size. Sorry about that!!
I Can't check it on my machines they both have customized settings witch I will lose going back and forth. So I'm running to my neighbors house.
I will post my findings later.
PS: Reading the documents sure is telling me allot about this subject. especially the part with different DPI settings.

[RichardAtherton]

Can you post the names of the documents that you are looking at and where tofind them as it mght be of some help to me, I am definitely having problems in this area.

[nemaroller]

Originally posted by Rally2000
If what you are saying was true then how come “although the size of my app. was below 800 x 600” it did not fit his screen?
About it being strait forward, yes that is what I thought too. But yet I’m having problems.
Don’t get this the wrong way, it was not “that big” off an issue, I ended up making all windows a little smaller and that solved the problem, but I still don’t understand.
I have found some documentation that I’m in process of reading, maybe that will clear things up.

I imagine the reason it didn't fit, was the system fonts were set at 120 DPI. This was the same concern programmers had to deal with back in VB6 or any language. IF the user sets their system to large fonts... everything scales to fit those new font sizes.

So even if you design a form at 800x600, and the user runs it at 800x600, the form may still not fit, because the system fonts are set at large (120dpi) or more. Some laptops may have arbritarily strange true font sizes because of the way the hardware drivers display the fonts.

Here's an article concerning FONT DPI in .Net. Its all about AutoScaleBaseSize which is analyzed anytime any control intializes.

http://devcenter.infragistics.com/Ar...ArticleID=1260

[nemaroller]

And to Richard, using pixels as the default graphics measurement in VB.NEt wasn't based on solving any problems. All it does solve, is making VB.Net more in-tune with other languages that use pixel for measurements. And personally, I never understood why MS implemented "TWIPS" for VB6 anyway.

[RichardAtherton]

thanks nemaroller for the input. I guess my real problem is lack of knowledge. I can see the effects when running at higher resolutions but do not understand the underlying causes.

My own computer only has 2 resolutions 800 x 600 or 1024 x 768.

Design a form in 800 x 600 and change the resolution to 1024 x 768, everything scales fine.

Out in the field when installing my design time screens (1024 x 768) , higher resolutions are definitely causing problems.

The controls on the forms seem to scale correctly but the form itself does not.

This is early on with this problem and I really hope that others have come across this problem and found some way of resolving it.

[RichardAtherton]

seem to have found a potential solution to this problem google searches threw up a company call Kliks! Software which advertise a product to address this problem. Just downloaded a trial version of their software and certainaly it rendered forms correctly going the other way from 1024 x 768 down to 800 x 600.

Don't see this as an endorsement, if you are interested their url
is

http://www.kliksoft.com

and the product is called Klick! SizeLib.net v1.2