Windows forms app, autoscale controls with form

Question

I\'m a newbie. Designing a form that can be resized, and I want my textboxes, labels and buttons to resize with the form, can someone tell me how to do this?

Answer 1

It depends on the type of layout you need. The "basic tools" you have to do that are following properties: Anchor and Dock.

Anchor

With the Anchor property you "attach" a side of an element to a side of its container. For example if you place a button in the bottom-right corner of a window and you set "Bottom, Right" as Anchor then when you'll resize the form the button will keep its relative position to that corner. Now imagine you place a multiline text-box in the form, resize as needed (for example 4 px from top, left and right border and 128 px height) and set the Anchor property to "Left, Top, Right". When you'll resize the form that control will keep its height but it'll resize to keep its margins (so if you'll make the form wider its width will be increased).

Dock

Dock is different. With docking you "say" to the Layout Manager to use all available space in one direction. For example if you set to Left then your control will keep its width but it'll use all the available height and its location will be most left as possible. You may have more than one control docked in a container, imagine you have 5 textbox with Top docking inside a form. They'll be stacked to the top of the form using all the width (and resizing). Another example: a Top docked control (as a banner) and a "Fill" docked control (as main content). Remember that with docking the order of controls matters (if you first place the "Fill" control it'll use ALL the available space and the "Top" dock control will overlap).

Even more

Moreover you have some layout controls too (tables and stacks). They're really easy to use and a 30 minutes of "experiments" will clarify much better than a long text.