How to resize a Canvas in WPF?

Question

I'm writing a WPF app that has a canvas in it. This canvas will be custom rendered at runtime. It's sort of like a game in that it needs to be measured in pixels. I need to be able to set my Canvas to 478x478 pixels (client rectangle size). I don't want any scaling or other resolution-independent steps to take place on my Canvas.

I'm not sure if this is possible in WPF, since its nature is to be resolution independent. My questions:

1. How do I resize my Canvas at runtime (function to call?)
2. When I resize my Canvas, is the renderable area (the client rectangle) going to be that size? If not, how can I resize it to make sure the client rectangle is a specific width/height?
3. Is it possible to set the width/height of the Canvas in Pixels? How does the resolution-independent aspect of WPF interfere with what I'm trying to do?
4. When I resize my Canvas, will other controls resize appropriately as they have been designed to do in the WPF designer?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

resizing is cake:

MyCanvas.Width = 350;
MyCanvas.Height  = 450;

this sets the size, you CAN render to coordinates outside of this, but it will be clipped. You can wrap your canvas inside a scroller to allow the user to see what is outside the height/width of the canvas.

as for the rest of your questions, i think you can see this SO question for your answers

Answer 2

Any elements positioned in a canvas will not resize or reposition based upon the size of the canvas. So I don't think there's any advantage to setting the size of the canvas. Maybe you should just set a fixed size of the window instead.

Otherwise, just set the Canvas.Width, Height, and ClipToBounds=True and you have a fixed sized canvas that positions its child elements with X/Y coordinates.

Also you should be sure to set SnapsToDevicePixels=True on the canvas so that child elements will have crisp pixel-aligned bounds.