Interfaces & Scaling

[Bopo]

Hi ppl

Okay very soon I will be changing many many forms interfaces, due to each forum is poorly laid out, barely any HCI consideration etc.

Anyways I know I will encounter problems, mainly due the mass amount of controls on each forum, but my main concern is resolution.

Within this building, their is a big age range 19 - 55, and due to this, alot of the senior members have resolutions such as 800 x 600 which would cause problems due to the size of these forms.

I was wondering how you developers tackle this, I was thinking on including something which detects the users resolution (easy enough) and then scales all controls to an x or their orginial size if the resolution is below a certain ratio, Im wondering if this is actually possible, the system has over 50 forms, so I want to get it right first time

Any input appreciated

[RhinoBull]

Before the "large and wide screens era" 800x600 was pretty much standard for developers although many were actually developing on a higher resolution systems.
800x600 still comes to play and the only way to resolve this is to use some component that proportionally resizes everything on the form.
Here is a link to some of them designed for pre-dot-net and dot-net.

[Hack]

My question would be do you have the ability to test your new program under a wide variety of different resolutions prior to rolling it out?

That is really the only way you will find out how it reacts.