Silverlight 4 Controls

Question

I have a problem with Silverlight 4. The problem is that i am developing on a 24" monitor screen. When i get home from work i continue to develop on my laptop which only has 19" monitor screen.

And what really irretates me is that the controls is not where i want them to be.

The controls are added upon each other. I am using simple controls like Buttons, textboxes etc.

I do also have the controls within a Grid.Row and a Grid.Column. I have tried with StackPanels also inside the grid and in the Columns etc. Also tried to have Stackpanel and a Grid inside, and i also tried with Canvas.

On Experts-Exchange a member wrote that this is a common problem in Silverlight - which i definitely do not believe.

Answer 1

I would agree that this is a common problem with Silverlight. It isn't that it isn't possible to get it right, but sometimes getting all of the controls to line up properly using different resolutions can be a challenge. Often a challenge that developers just don't take the time to solve.

For me it just comes down to trial and error with regards to setting row and column width/heights to Auto, *, and fixed and then combining this with StackPanels and ScrollViewers. I haven't used it, but I believe one of the Developer Toolkits had a StackGrid, or something like that. It combined the functionality of stackpanels and grids into a single control. I've heard others claim that using that control made things easier.

Pay attention to Vertical/Horizontal Alignment and Margins to help position the controls too.

Answer 2

When developing for multiple resolutions, use the design size handles to keep re-sizing your interface.

If the interface just cannot go below a certain size, set that as the MinHeight/MinWidth and place it all in a scrollviewer. That way scrollbars will simply kick in if the screen gets too small to be usable for your design.

Silverlight grids are a lot like HTML tables in that you need to flex them about a lot to ensure you have correctly linked to the right edges/positions. Silverlight has more options (thanks to stretch etc) and it just takes practice to learn how to nest the boxing model to do what you want.