How to align buttons uniformly in a tool strip? - winforms

I have a tool strip container in which i have a tool strip.Inside the tool strip i have added three buttons. These buttons are laid out in the vertical tool strip one over another. The distance between the last button and bottom of tool strip is greater than the distance between two buttons. How do i reduce it so that all the buttons look equally distributed in the tool strip?

Checkout: How to: Change the Spacing and Alignment of ToolStrip Items in Windows Forms

Related

How to horizontally align tabs in chrome-dev-menu,instead of vertical alignment, for extension React-dev tools?

I am building ReactApp, and for debugging using React-Dev-Tools,
while testing states of the component, It shows two menus side by side,at left side <React/> code and at right values of states.
debugging screen is divided vertically between two.
but, I am following a tutorial, where these menus are horizontally divided and seem efficient and more readable compared to mine.
tutor's screen = more readable code, due to horizontal alignment.
but my screen-space is wasted due to a vertical division as this,
I also tried dock(debugger menu) at the bottom, but it's more readable.
How can I align two menus/tabs horizontally in chrome tools, though I had reset settings in debug menu?
Edit 1: after getting solution.
after increasing font size, the screen is not splitting vertically, and I am getting same chrome-dev-tools-screen, as same as that of my tutor.
The vertical split happens when you reduce the dev-tools window size.
This feature is described on this github page:
https://github.com/facebook/react-devtools/pull/541
Here is the video showing it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdKVJEy41M4
You can split tabs horizontally in Chrome 87 (and see one of them). Right click Network in the menu and select "Move to bottom"

How can I neatly line up right-aligned check boxes with with other controls?

The Visual Studio WinForms designer lets you snap together text boxes, list boxes, buttons, and so forth reasonably well. However, a check box with CheckAlign=MiddleRight does not work quite like the others, because it has two components: the built-in label, and the check box itself. If you line up the text with other labels, the check box is left floating and will not automatically line up. You can turn off AutoSize and attempt to size the CheckBox control so the check box lines up, but this is touchy and will be thrown off by custom font sizes.
In this example, I've almost lined up the check box with the other controls, but not quite:
If I had several check boxes it would be a real headache, as with AutoSize turned off the position of the check box is relative to the end of the text, so each control has to be individually sized pixel by pixel.
What's the best way to line up check boxes with other controls?
One workaround is to not include text with the CheckBox and instead have a separate Label control. However, by doing so you lose the ability to click on the label to toggle the check box. On a high-resolution screen, clicking a 10x10 pixel is finicky, a poor UX experience. You could add an OnClick event to the label, of course, but that seems like solving the wrong problem.
Here's an example of someone else with the same issue: in the preferences panel in Oracle SQL Developer, when there's a mix of properties the check boxes are handled with separate labels and boxes:
Personally, i avoid that issue by not having the CheckBoxes aligned to the right:
rather than having the caption on the left.

Control snapping in Visual Studio 2010

I'm sort-of just nit picking here, but maybe there's a simple solution which will save me some time.
When I'm drawing my Winforms GUI in the designer, controls snap to certain points. I can align the baseline of the text of one control to that of another, I can align the left and/or top of one control to another, etc. This is all great.
What's great too, is that the controls snap to other controls spaced with their margins. This means that if I'm making a vertical array of TextBoxes, then I can have them equidistant in my GUI - it looks less messy.
However not everything snaps correctly, or at all. Say I have put in my TextBoxes and now I wish to reduce the width of my form so that there is no white space between the edges of the TextBoxes and the edge of the form. Additionally, I want the distance between the edge of the TextBoxes and the edge of the Form to be the same on the left as it is on the right. If I drag the right edge of the form to the left, towards the TextBoxes it will not snap. I'm left with either calculations to work out what the width should be, or a juggling act to gradually reduce the width until the TextBox is snapping to both the left of the right.
I'm not saying this process is particularly difficult or time consuming. It's just that if it were to snap, the whole process would be infinitely easier.
Is there a built-in option in VS2010, or perhaps an extension? Or maybe I'm just doing it wrong in the first place?
The snap lines in the designer work perfectly when moving or resizing any of the built-in controls. The only time that they don't work is when you are resizing the form itself.
I agree that it would be extremely convenient to have snap lines here, as well. I wish I knew of a way to enable this. But unfortunately, I don't believe that there is one.
The workarounds are either to calculate the proper size mathematically, or guess at resizing the form then check your work by dragging one of the controls (and using the snap lines that appear). I go through the same "juggling act" that you describe on an unfortunately regular basis.
Whenever a control needs to be positioned so that it "snaps" to a form edge I usually move (or resize) the controls to the correct size first, and then change the controls "Anchor" property of those controls to be anchored to the corresponding form edge (even if the form itself won't be allowed to resize).
That way whenever I resize the form, the controls position relative to that form remains the same, simply resizing or moving the control as required (depending on the Anchor property chosen).
I completely agree that the ability to "snap" the form to controls when resizing the form would be extremely useful, but its normally possible to work-around using the anchor property in this way - the times when its doesn't work (such as when a form consists entirely of a column of text-boxes is a fixed height), I'm afraid you need to resort to calculations, but I find that most of my dialogs are resizable.

Scaling two Windows Forms controls while keeping the same ratio

I have 2 controls in a resize-able panel (1 datagridview and 1 textbox) with some space betwen and I need them both to scale in all directions with the panel. Problem is, since they're vertically stacked they run into each other when the panel scales vertically. I think I need some way to scale vertically while keeping the same ratio of the total panel size (ie, if the panel is scaled 2x, each control is scaled 2x) instead of anchoring them to all sides. Using C# if that matters, but I'm hoping for a non-programmatic solution.
A TableLayoutPanel was designed to provide this kind of scaling support. You'll need three rows with the middle one Absolute and the top and bottom Percent. Dock fill the controls in the rows, the rest is automatic.

Windows Forms (Or GUI development in general) advice

How should I develop a form that can resize nicely?
While that sounds like a simple question the problem I'm struggling with is the fact I'm reproducing an existing application I made in Swing several years back. Its built around a single form that hides/reveals panels as you select different options.
Its around 600 x 700 pixels wide say but its a fixed size window.
Is this good practice? The GUI works fine this way but if you look at other applications you can resize them easily. Granted some applications look stupid full size but should the option be there?
The main screen consists of about five buttons, when maximized this looks ridicilous, but at the same time if the form is resizable the moment you start resizing the form it becomes stupid.
I'm aware of layout managers and so forth so no need to tell me to check these out, my main problem is the fact I can produce an excellent fixed width application but that's about it.
Any advice/links for this?
Personally, I think fixed size forms are a horrible User Experience.
I always try to build mine so that they can be gracefully resized (even if they do look a little odd).
If you're using .NET for your WinForms development, you can easily use a table layout and then anchor your controls so that they resize politely.
A fixed size gui is generally a bad idea because most forms have a user interface element that can sensibly be resized.
First consider a form that only contains two buttons. (A silly form, yeah, but for the sake of discussion we'll assume that it's the right thing for the job) When sized initially in the right way (appropriately for localization, e.g.), there's no good reason to make the form resizable. If you enlarged or mazimized the form, you'd only make the area to click the button bigger, but you'd be clicking a smaller area than the button to resize it, so there's no reason. In this case, it doesn't make sense for the form to be resizable because there's no user-benefit for adding the extra control.
Now consider a form that contains a listview. There are clear usability benefits to making this form resizable in both dimensions. The listview may contain more items than can be shown in a smaller area, both horizontally and vertically, so it makes sense that this form be fully resizable to allow the user to display as much or as little of the data as they want.
Every form control implicitly has certain degrees of freedom either by constraint or by convention. Conventionally, buttons don't resize, so they have no degrees of freedom (even though they can resize). Listviews and listboxes have two degrees of freedom, horizontal to display more data per row and vertical to display more rows. Single line textboxes have one degree of freedom, horizontal. Because they're single line, they don't expand vertically, but they do expand horizontally.
These degrees of freedom help you determine the layout of your form. Form elements that have degrees of freedom should resize in the appropriate direction when the form is resized. I prefer to design my forms with only one control that has two degrees of freedom in an area where areas are typically separated via splitters. I prefer to avoid the explicit table layout panel unless there's a very specific need for it because it's easy to make a form overly complex when there's a table layout to work with. The anchors in WinForms provide an extremely powerful and flexible abstraction for control layout, however, so I strongly encourage their usage.
Aside from the layout panels (my favorite is the table layout), become familiar with the Anchor, Dock (more for the table layout), and MinimumSize properties. They do a lot of work for you when it comes to resizing forms.
Most of your forms will look goofy maximized but my general rules were these:
Buttons stay the same size
regardless of form size (no Top and
Bottom anchor; no Left and Right
anchor).
Buttons stay in the same place with
respect to a border (Anchor
combinations: {Left, Top}, {Left,
Bottom}, {Right, Top}, {Right,
Bottom})
Only the right-most textbox grows
when resizing (Anchor = Left and
Right).
Single multiline textboxes rule the form
(Anchor = Left, Right, Top, Bottom)
With multiple multiline textboxes, the lowest one rules the form.
MinimumSize is less that 640x480 whenever possible; 800x600 max.
The default size is the MinimumSize -- let the users make it bigger if they need to.

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