Quote Originally Posted by dilettante View Post
No, there are no magic settings.

Microsoft has been gradually improving the high-DPI experience for parts of Windows (like File Explorer) but it has been a challenge even for them.

GDI Scaling is your best bet for a low effort approach. It isn't perfect because GDI+ doesn't participate and DIBs can't be scaled automagically either.

Improving the high-DPI experience in GDI based Desktop Apps is one of the last writeups on this. Microsoft isn't really interested in helping developers of traditional desktop applications because UWP ("Metro reloaded") hasn't done as well as they had hoped.

WPF can adapt to High DPI a little better, though it still has warts the programmer must work around. WinForms doesn't have much support for High DPI unless you do the work yourself. In this it is about the same as VB6's Forms3, both being based on Win32 controls and GDI.
1. Is there any alternative to VB.net and Visual Studio which will produce good font appearance on smaller as well as bigger (higher resolution) screens?

2. How does Microsoft manage to show sharp fonts in its own software on high dpi screens?