Why does Visual Studio 2010 have rendering problems in VMware? - wpf

We were testing our WPF application on Windows XP in the VMware Player (with VMware Tools) and noticed that dropdowns were buggy in that all the choices would appear when you clicked on the ComboBox but as you moused over them they would disappear.
We then noticed that Visual Studio Express 2010 has the exact same problem with its menus.
Here a menu item is hanging by itself in the middle of the screen:
Here a menu item is stretched:
We have WMware Tools installed:
We would definitely like to get our application to work without these bugs in VMware. Has anyone experienced these problems and know if it is a problem with VMware, XP, WPF, or WPF 4.0?

I had the same problem and based on a VMWare support article http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1011709 I changed my graphics adapter from VMWare SVGA II to the default (native) Windows 7 driver.
This solved the problem for me.

I read this post to install two patches for Visual Studio 2010 and WPF. This solves the problem.

I've found problem with selection and scrolling during code editing.
Sometimes the text disappears and other times the selected text becomes unreadable.
If you turn of VMWare SVGA you can't resize the screen at any size.
I solved it enabling Aero themes (google for "install aero on windows 8").
Don't ask me how but it solves my problem.

Related

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'

Default DPI effects on Visual Studio and Windows Forms

I am having a strange effect when editing a legacy Windows Forms project in Visual Studio 2015 on my new computer with a high DPI (150%) setting. When I edit the project on the laptop screen (DPI 150) everything appears normal and the forms' default font is the standard size of 8pt (note Visual Studio's menus and text all appear correctly), but when I dock the laptop and use on my monitors with a DPI of 100 all the forms get increased to a font size of 15.25. It's almost as if somewhere, when I installed Visual Studio (and SQL Server Management Studio for that matter), they registered the DPI 150% setting as the default and when I drop back down to 100% everything is getting inverted (150/100). Anyone have any experience with this? I can't follow other articles to get my Windows Forms project DPI-Aware if I can't get back to a 96 DPI baseline.
I have solved my own issue. Documenting here for anyone else who might have this strange experience. When docked, I had three displays connected, two 1920x1200 monitors through DVI and one 1024x768 projector through VGA. Apparently this extra projector connection was creating some sort of strange DPI issues in Visual Studio's form designer (and SQL Server Management Studio's query results). Disconnecting the VGA connection fixed the problem.

Winforms control spacing in Windows 7

We have an in-house .net 2.0 winforms app currently developed on Visual Studio 2005 in Windows XP. Everyone in the office until now is running Windows XP, and there are no issues.
We recently ordered a new computer with Windows 7 for one of our managers we were hoping to use, and the app installs fine. The issue is the spacing around every label, textbox, and button - making some forms not fit.
Is there some setting that we can use to make Windows 7 display each control where it is placed in our XP development environment and like the rest of our XP clients show?
Ugh, what kind of idiot management team gives a new machine to a manager instead of a programmer?
Control Panel + Display, Advanced tab, change the DPI setting to repro the problem on your XP machine. Read the docs for the Form.AutoScaleMode to find out what's going on.

WPF Controls disappearing in Windows 7?

We have a system built using WPF and have (until recently) been developing using Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and Windows XP SP3.
We have upgraded some of our development boxes to windows 7 and we have discovered we are getting some unexpected behaviour when running our applications. Some controls do not display at all.
Has anybody else experienced issues like these and if so, how can we make them work?
Thanks in advance.
Just a guess I had some similar issues with controls (buttons in my case) that were using the DropShadowEffect. The solution was to switch from DropShadowEffect to DropShadowChrome.

Why do my toolbox items disappear in Visual Studio 2008?

I'm working on a solution that contains multiple projects targeting Windows Mobile 5 and standard Windows applications.
Lately when opening up a form in designer the common UI controls (textbox, button, label, etc etc...) have vanished leaving only the controls defined within the project.
Resetting the toolbox has no effect. A google search suggested deleting the toolbox temp files in the Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0, however this was only successful in bringing back the default controls for Windows Mobile 5. The WinForms controls are still mysteriously missing.
Also, if I right-click and Select All on the toolbox, all of the WinForms controls do in fact come up, however they're all grayed out.
Has anyone else experienced this?
I just had a similiar problem. In a managed C++ project all the default toolbox items disappeared form the winforms designer. After playing around for a while I found that there was a problem in the .vcproj file.
<VisualStudioProject
ProjectType="Visual C++"
Version="9,00"
Name="COLLADA Import"
ProjectGUID="{0DEEF9B6-1929-44E3-92EC-13712839FB63}"
RootNamespace="COLLADAImport"
Keyword="ManagedCProj"
TargetFrameworkVersion="0"
>
When you set TargetFrameworkVersion to a valid number, for example 131072 for .Net 2.0, the toolbox items will be back.
If you right click on the Toolbox and select 'Choose Items...' and then sort by the 'Namespace' column, you can then select the ones you need (for example System.Windows.Forms for WinForms).
You can multiselect with Shift and then select/deselect the group.
The controls then reappear in the Toolbox as enabled.
I've noticed this exact same thing for regular WinForms as well. I can't speak to mobile applications but in regular winforms this has a tendency to happen.
I believe it's actually a bug in Visual Studio.
There are some things you can do (again, for WinForms. I'm not sure about mobile) with adding attributes to your control. Such as:
[ToolboxBitmap(typeof(MyControl), "MyControlBitmap")]
There are some other useful related things on this site:
http://en.csharp-online.net/Design-Time_Integration-Attributes
I had exactly the same problem (after installing Windows Mobile SDK all items in the toolbox were greyed out).
I've startet the Visual Studio 2008 command line as administrator and started the following command (WARNING - all your settings are lost !!)
devenv /setup /resetuserdata /selfreg /resetskippkgs
After that the toolbox looked fine and worked like on the first day.
The idea came from this thread: connect.microsoft.com
Go to the Tools menu and choose import & export settings, then choose the 'reset all' setting, then yes. Save your current settings, after that you'll have your toolbox reappear.
Actually you may be able to add a registry key to get this to work also.
Make sure you're not in Debug mode.
If you are running Visual Studio 2008 under vista, try running it as an Administrator. Right click on the shortcut and select Run as Administrator.
Well guess what install Service pack 1 for VS 2008 and it would go away and if you have wireless mouse and keyboard turn it off. Choose one of these two both work.

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