Windows Mobile form size

Question

I’m creating a windows mobile app which uses a custom GUI. It has an image as background and some text and images rendered on it. I want to do as little image processing in the app itself, so I’m creating different skins for different screen resolutions. If I need to support another screen resolution I’ll just add another skin.

But what concerns me is that different emulator images have different sizes on their taskbars and menu bars, so the size of the actual form is not the same for all devices with the same resolution. So far I’ve found emulators where the taskbar and menu is either 104 (usually VGA, WVGA…) or 52 (QVGA, QWVGA…) pixels high. Do those menus always take up 52 or 104 pixels, or do device vendors or power users install things like a 3px high battery meter so the menu suddenly takes up 107 pixels?

Answer 1

From what I've seen with windows mobile, there is a standard screen size and the various emulator's sizes are scalings of that standard size IE 104px is a scale factor of 2 over 52px. In NETCF at least, the drawing API handled the scaling fairly well.

Answer 2

yep i remember having problems with this in the past as well - iirc the default bar size was a multiple of 26 or something (so 52 and 104 seems to fit) - i dont have the code here unfortunately, but i think it used something like this:

uint titleBarHeight = GetSystemMetrics(SM_CYCAPTION);
if(!titleBarHeight)
{
    GetLastError()
    ..blah
    blah..
}

i remember there being a problem with the apps detecting if the bottom button bar was present, but that might have just been the order i did things in at load-time..

hth fusi