Designing a tablet PC-optimized application with WPF. Advice needed on aspect ratios

Question

I would appreciate some advice on best practices with my first WPF app (a touchscreen based app with large buttons, custom controls - that will generally run on tablet PCs).

One thing I am curious about is how one deals with different aspect ratios:

The WPF app I am building is a touchscreen-based one, and thus needs to scale from resolution to resolution with custom (i.e. large) xaml-defined controls. However, what if one of the tablet PC's run 1024x768 (ratio 1.3333), and another one runs 1280x800 (ratio 1.60).

That's two very different ratios; one is widescreen and one is clearly not. Perhaps it is best just to design the application in the first place to fit widescreen-type aspect ratios only? (In which case, the non-widescreen screens will see black "bars" on the top and bottom of the screen.)

What is commonly done? I'd very much like to avoid common pitfalls.

Answer 1

I think you'll find that there are far more widescreen tablets than 4x3 tablets. If you must design for a specific aspect ratio, I'd choose a wide-screen target, and use it as your baseline.

However, with WPF, it's very easy to design interfaces that scale to any aspect - which would be my preference. It'd be better, in my opinion, to allow some portions of your interface to fill space rather than do "black bars".