Mimic/emulate a specific screen resolution for sizing WinForms?

Question

I am currently developing a Winforms Application that will run on a very specific tablet PC.

My development environment uses dual-17" monitors which are far bigger than the tablet screen size of 10.4" (1024x768).

Due to the purchasing department at my company the delivery of the tablet will not be until well into the design cycle.

Is it possible to mimic the tablet size so that I can adjust my forms to match?

Answer 1

You could try hosting your main form inside a user control or another form limited to the relevant size. However, the form is then not a "top level" form, but fairly closely looks and behaves like one.

You can perform normal form actions (minimise / maximise / move / resize / etc) so you can get a feel for what it is like and a certain size.

However in this instance, its best to always design the UI for the minimum resolution you have to target, and have it scale upwards on larger monitors.

Answer 2

You have couple of options:

• set one of your screens to the tablet resolution. You might need to move your taskbar to that screen to get the proper-sized workspace.
• install Virtual PC and create a VM with the tablet resolution.
• set your main form size explicitly to the tablet PC resolution. For best results size it to the proper workspace size, not the desktop size.

Note that your form will have to still be relatively flexible, since users might configure their taskbar to be at a different position, or different size, thus affecting the available workspace for your app.

Answer 3

The fact that you have 1024x768 on 10.4" means the pixels are denser than your typical PC monitor. That means that text 10 pixels high on your monitor might look fine, but 10 pixels high on the tablet PC may be tiny and almost unreadable (even without loss of resolution).

Unless you can find a monitor with similar pixel density, I don't think you can properly mimic it. Even if you can shrink the application to a 10.4" section of the monitor, now you're probably dealing with sub-pixel shading which will look blurrier than on the tablet PC.

The best you can probably do is setting one of your monitors to 1024x768 (without stretching to fill the screen!), or just set your app to that size and eyeball it to take into account that it will actually be smaller.

Answer 4

very easy - if you're concerned about size, or users have to use the touch screen, start your form out with 10pt+ font

very cool - design the form size as, oh, 950x650. Experiment with the anchor property of each control. Allows you to make basically totally resizable controls (if you get creative with the anchor on groupboxes/panels and the controls inside them).

then set your form to maximize itself on the tablet PC (or e.g., if screen size is <= 1280x1024 - the Anchor property has its limitations as to what size increase looks reasonable).