tips – César Souza

If you have just opened one of your previous applications in your brand new computer with a very high-dpi monitor, perhaps you will find out that your interface that previously worked perfectly is now utterly broken and/or blurry.

This might be the case, for example, if you just tried to open an old Windows.Forms application in your brand new Surface Pro computer.

winforms-dpi-off — Windows.Forms (WinForms) application in a high-dpi display. If you have your DPI set to 150%, your form might now look like this.

winforms-dpi-on — Same WinForms application after applying the fix detailed here.

How to fix it

Go the the Forms designer, then select your Form (by clicking at its title bar)
Press F4 to open the Properties window, then locate the AutoScaleMode property
Change it from Font (default) to Dpi.

Now, go to Program.cs (or the file where your Main method is located) and change it to look like

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Windows.Forms;

namespace Classification.BoW
{
    static class Program
    {
        [STAThread]
        static void Main()
        {
            if (Environment.OSVersion.Version.Major &gt;= 6)
                SetProcessDPIAware();

            Application.EnableVisualStyles();
            Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(false);
            Application.Run(new MainForm());
        }

        [System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImport("user32.dll")]
        private static extern bool SetProcessDPIAware();
    }
}

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Windows.Forms;

namespace Classification.BoW

{

static class Program

{

[STAThread]

static void Main()

{

if (Environment.OSVersion.Version.Major >= 6)

SetProcessDPIAware();

Application.EnableVisualStyles();

Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(false);

Application.Run(new MainForm());

}

[System.Runtime.InteropServices.DllImport("user32.dll")]

private static extern bool SetProcessDPIAware();

}

Save and compile. Now your form should look crispy again.

I encountered this problem while opening and editing Accord.NET sample applications in Visual Studio in a Surface 3 Pro.

César Souza

Tag: tips

How to fix blurry Windows Forms Windows in high-dpi settings

How to fix it

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