Hi,
We are trying to make our winforms app dpi aware, but we are having trouble when we use the UltraDockManager.
The areas and panes do not scale, and so everything gets crushed (for example the font increases in size for the titles, but the depth and width of the title bar has not been scaled).
Is there something I am missing, or do I need to find an alternative to the Dock Manager?
Hi Simon,
When the DPI Aware setting is enabled, all of the automatic scaling that Windows does is disabled. This is because the DPI Aware setting tells Windows that this application knows to check for the system DPI and respond based on the current DPI settings. You may be seeing these issues if you have not yet accommodated for DPI settings in your application. You can read more about writing DPI Aware applications here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dn469266(v=vs.85).aspx
That being said, we have heard of DPI-related artifacts that appear to be related to an issue in our tool. We are actively working to isolate this issue so we can resolve it. Are you able to send a reproduction sample that we can use to debug? Please include as much information about your environment as possible -- this issue appears to be very sensitive to system settings.
I created a little test app to see what controls are giving me issues.
I started with just the UltraButton and UltraTab controls and they rendered fine on my laptop (screen DPI set at 192, scaling at 200%)
I then added the UltraDockManager as we rely heavily on that, and this is when the issues started with the scaling of the title bars, and the width of the panels.
Attached project
I ran your sample on my laptop (200%) DPI. And it looks fine to me. I don't see any obvious artifacts or problems with the font. Here's a screen shot of what it looks like.
Is there something wrong here that I'm not seeing? Or are you getting different results? If the latter, then try getting the latest service release, because that's what I'm using.
Hi Mike,
I used the latest service release (16.2.20162.2040) but the titles to the windows are still not scaled correctly. I attach a screenshot to show what it looks like on my laptop.
Regards
Simon
I'm a little confused. I'm looking at your screen shot and I'm having trouble understanding what you feel is wrong with it? I don't see anything here that looks incorrect. Can you explain more specifically exactly what you feel is wrong with this? I don't see any significant difference between your screen shot and mine.
Going back and looking at your original post, you mentioned something about the font size increasing. But I don't see that here. I do see that the width of the panes is not increasing and so some of the text is cut off and you get some ellipsis (...) showing. But that's correct. That's what DPIAware means. It means that your application is aware of the DPI and adjusts. It means that the DotNetFrameowork makes NO adjustments. The width of a control on your machine is specified in pixels and it will be the same number of pixels on every machine. A machine running a higher DPI, therefore, will show that object as much smaller. It sounds like you are confused about what DPIAware means. A lot of people get it backward and think it means that it will automatically resize your controls to look good on any DPI. But that's the opposite of what it does.
Mike,
The issue that I have is that both the UltraButton and UltraTab controls have sized themselves to accommodate for the higher DPI.
The UltraDockPanes have stayed the same width in pixels that they were designed with. I haven't needed to write any scaling code for the buttons and tab dialog (I would say that they are DPI aware), where the UltraDockManager has not.
If you use the splitter drag bar to increase the width of the System Explorer, you will also see that the adorner is too small, and the drag line gets displayed in the wrong position. I have attached an image to show this.
We are having the exact same issue. We have million of lines of code in Winform and we are not going to change soon.
We are doing the change to our application to make it DPI aware and so far everythign is working fine except the Infragistics controls which don't honor the DPI awarness. Very disapointing.
We may change the tool we are using though because the idea using Infragistics was to get help in these difficult situations.
Hugues
I believe that I'm not your only customer who is buying Infragistics suite mainly for maintaining older Windows.Forms applications. Neither I believe that WPF or UWP are definitely The Way when it comes to desktop development: sure it might be, but before facing huge porting projects for very complex LOB applications, any investment must be very carefully planned. So this is why Windows.Forms is still not playing a side role in desktop development, and in this field, DPI awareness is a major theme.
Maybe we are all 'victims' of MS strategy, but when I read from Infragistics R&D that "none of our controls are DPI aware", I feel that the money spent by your Windows.Forms customers in renewing their subscriptions is wasted.
With the exception of the UltraLiveTileView, none of our controls are DPI aware. As such, the options are to either allow the .NET framework to perform the scaling for you (which tends to paint the form with blurry rendering due to the scaling), or to mark the application as DPI aware, and perform the scaling manually. I'll use a bulleted list in hopes of avoiding missing an issue:
I hope this helps to clarify some of these issues.
Chris
>The Debug output you have provided shows that controls (not just Infragistics controls, but all design-time generated controls) are being scaled.
The left pane and the right pane width didn't scale correctly as you can see in the output. It's a shame because, as you have observed, the rest of the controls are being scaled.
Please add that to Robin's list of DPI problems in the UltraDockManager.
Hi Chris,
Thanks for the reply.
Our end goal here is to make our application DPI Aware, remain functional and look beautiful.
From other threads, I believe that your UltraDockManager is not DPI Aware and therefore does not respect the AutoScaleMode property that a Framework ContainerControl would give. Please correct me if I am wrong. Therefore we need to manage the scaling ourselves.
However, whilst we can do this, from the testing we have done there are still some issues:
Thanks
Robin