FixedToolWindow border size - winforms

I am being forced to update a VS2010 project to VS2013. One of the forms is a fixedtoolwindow, and is badly effected by the increase in width of the form's default borders.
FYI, all borders of the form have grown ~4 or 5 px. This is significant on my design for an embedded computer with a limited screen.
The 'Enable XP Visual Styles' checkbox has no effect on this problem.
Is there a simple way to retain the VS2010 visual style rather than modify the forms in this project?

Thanks to Hans to pointing this in the right direction.
The entire problem was the windows theme on the development computer. The current theme is assumed by Visual Studio as the default for the target machine. Simply changing the development computer's theme to "Window's Classic" solved the issue.

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How do I fix DPI scaling issues for Visual Studio 2017 Windows Forms

I've been encountering this issue ever since I bought this laptop with 4k display in 2015. With a lot of effort I managed to work around the issue but I'm growing tired of it.
VS2017 is supposedly DPI aware hence I do not expect any issues when creating a simple MDI Parent Form and running the app. But to my frustration the icons in the toolStrip (just the standard one in the MDI parent form) are scaled horribly.
When I create a form with a button on it which looks just fine in Visual Studio 2017 designer and I run the app and load the form, the button text isn't completely shown.
My display settings are as follows:
Resolution: 3840x2160
Scaled 250% (in display settings) because at 100% everything is unreadable
I've tried to find solutions, but the only workable thing I could find was setting my visual studio designer to dpi-unaware via registry (link here)
Help anyone?
Update When I add a new MDI form with the setting of DPI-awareness OFF, everything looks OK except Visual Studio itself (blurry).
I have similar problem when working with Windows Forms (Windows Forms Designer) on Visual Studio 2017, but I think it would be the same on Visual Studio 2019.
From Microsoft documentation here, there is a tip to disable the scaling/DPI aware feature.
If you prefer to manage settings from the command line, devenv.exe
takes /noscale as a command-line parameter to run in 100% scaling
mode.
So, basically, I just created a shortcut on the Desktop to Visual Studio (devenv.exe) and added the parameter /noscale on the shortcut Target field like so:
"...\path\to\IDE\devenv.exe" /noscale
So, everytime Visual Studio is started through the shortcut, it will always start with 100% scaling mode. If you use high resolution screen (high-dpi) screen, you will notice that the Visual Studio text will appear a little bit blurry because of this.
You should change the settings so there won't be a difference when the program runs on different machines.
Go to the project's properties page, then to Manifest Tool and then Input and Output. Change the DPI awareness to 'none'

Change Visual Studio 2012 WPF Forms Designer Background Color

I, like many developers, like to have dark background and light text - so I use the "Dark" theme on Visual Studio. However, when developing an application for WPF (which I admittedly do less often than I should), I have noticed that this has an unintended effect of making my controls difficult to read.
Thinking there is an easy solution out there, I tried changing the fonts/colors in VS, to no avail. There does not seem to be a color property for the WPF forms designer background color. The answer to this question does not seem to be applicable to either VS 2012 or Windows 7 (not sure which), as I did experiment with the control panel but did not find a suitable setting.
Does anyone know how to make the background a different color (ideally, a medium gray in this case)? See screenshot.
I'm not sure about 2012, as I have 2015, but I had a similar issue and found the appropriate settings here in tools->options->Environment->Fonts and Colours and select the XAML Designer:

Font changes between design time and runtime (VS 2010 and wpf)

When I create a window or custom control with wpf inside Visual Studio the default font used is Segoue UI 12 (at least on Windows 7). When I execute the application the font really used is Verdana 13, a bit greater, so some signs are cut and the user experience is a poor formatting look and feel. Don't know how to change the default font inside VS 2010 and if it is the best way to achieve the goal of aligning what I see during the design phase and what the user will see at run time.
I checked for the word 'Verdana' in the entire solution and it was not found so I'm quite sure this weird behavior is not due to a style which is applied as a dynamic resource.
Thanks for any help
Filippo
By default, WPF uses system font in runtime. If you want to always use Segoe UI, you can set FontFamily property to "Segoe UI".

Visual Studio and DPI issue

I am developing a Windows Forms application using VS2008 on Windows Vista. I tried to run my application on Windows XP the other day, and everything on GUI was messed up. I realized that I developed the application using 120 Dpi setting on Windows Vista and my XP was set to 96 dpi.
My application has several UserControls and all of them shrinks even in the Visual Studio itself if I change my DPI to 96. I am sure a lot of people are using Visual Studio in high DPIs these days. So how can make sure that my GUI does not get messed up both in Visual Studio and runtime?
EDIT: I have read couple articles on this issue and I learned that I should be setting AutoScaleMode to None. However, this still does not prevent my labels to adapt new DPI settings enforced by the operating system. I need a way to prevent my labels to grow/shrink because other GUI elements have fix sizes.
It has been a while since I worked on this issue, but try setting AutoSize = False. In addition, UseCompatibleTextRendering = True might help.
This is a rather old question, but I want to share my solution/opinion. I ran into a similar problem recently. Actually, I want Visual Studio to keep my WinForms as they are, but them to scale at runtime. I found no consistent summary on how to correctly do that. After some reading and experimenting I came to this solution:
Keep the Form’s AutoScaleMode = Font.
Set in your Forms Designer: Font = MS Sans; 11px
In the Forms Ctor, after InitializeComponent, set: Font = SystemFonts.DefaultFont
Enable DPI-Awareness, either through a manifest or by API function SetProcessDPIAwareness
Since AutoScaleMode remains active, all DPI-changing magic works, even per-monitor DPI awareness. What remains, is designing Forms in a way scaling works nicely.
I wrote the details on my Blog: http://www.sgrottel.de/?p=1581&lang=en

WPF not rendering on remote desktop

I'm having problems with the rendering of a WPF app over a remote desktop connection.
The applications chrome is rendering, but none of the content is coming through, as if the window is not drawing. Instead the previous content of the screen is showing in it's place.
This has been a problem with the application running on both Vista & Win 7, with remote control being taken from XP and Win7.
The problem is not application specific, if I create a new WPF app, with just a textblock on the window, it will also not run. (Neather will the windows preview in VS2008 display.)
Is there some trick to getting WPF running under RDP?
I read on Kevin Dente's blog (from a twitter post) that he was having trouble with WPF apps in virtual machines. While not the same as Remote Desktop, it's possible the problem could be the same. Kevin was able to fix his problem by disabling hardware accelleration by creating a DWORD registry value at
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Avalon.Graphics\DisableHWAcceleration
and then setting it to 1.
His original blog post is here: http://weblogs.asp.net/kdente/archive/2009/10/19/visual-studio-2010-beta-2-editor-performance-fix-running-on-a-virtual-machine.aspx
That may not be your exact solution, but maybe it points you in the right direction.
WPF should render over RDP; it's smart enough to know when it can render in hardware, and when it can't it reverts to its own GDI+ based software rendering. I would make sure you're running .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 on the remote machine, since there were changes to remoting that might pose issues. (See link below.)
I've been developing a WPF app for the past 6 months and it works just fine over RDP. (From Vista and Win7 to XP, Vista and Server 2003.) One important caveat, however, is that it renders using the Classic theme. So if you're using controls that don't have a classic theme, they won't render. If you're just dropping a TextBox on a Window, then obviously that's not your problem.
Check out this question for some links that may be helpful: Are there problems with rendering WPF over Remote Desktop under Windows XP?
I just had this problem with the ribbonwindow not displaying correctly when testing for the first time via RDP - the transparent background was white, the close minimize/maximize buttons were missing, the rounded corners on the bottom of the window were square, and the top row of ribbon buttons were almost impossible to select.
Turns out there was a simple fix for me. Right-click the RDP connection icon (I have it saved on my desktop), select "Edit", then the "experience" tab, and change "detect connection quality automatically" to "LAN (10 Mbps or higher)".
This fixed it for me.
Ade
Did you also try Win7 latest RDP - Win7 connection? The thing is WPF doesn't use GDI to draw elements.
VNC clients (like UltraVNC) probably will do the trick for you as they using much simplier algorithms more like of sending bitmaps.
I have the same problem than the asker. The standard, out-of-the-box Checkbox is not rendering correctly. I can only see if it is checked when hoovering the checkbox. Otherwhise, no difference between checked and unchecked. Important note : It occurs when setting the foreground to white (see here : https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/1c03db49-7e53-4cbb-9dd1-b328017c4453/wpf-checkbox-and-radiobutton-check-mark-not-showing-under-xp-windows-classic-theme-and-remote?forum=wpf)
Our application used to have this problem with a custom progress bar.
We fixed this by setting the background color of the Border control to White. This leads me to think there is an issue with transparent backgrounds
There is no special trick needed to get WPF content to show across remote desktop. Our WPF-based app renders just fine over RDP (tried from numerous machines) with no problems. We're even using animations, gradients, WriteableBitmap, etc. w/ no problems.

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