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

Question

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).

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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'