For some time I have had an interesting issue whereby attempting to run a game title in full-screen would result in the title only displaying the upper left quadrant of the actual display. This, naturally, made the game unplayable. I tried a few different resolutions but it seemed hit and miss as to whether it would function properly.

After some investigation, I suddenly realized that I was using a non-standard DPI, so perhaps that was causing the issue? I was able to right-click the programs and disable DPI scaling via the compatibility settings. After relaunching it, it worked fine at 1560×1440.

If your games are running in fullscreen but seem to be missing a good portion of the display area, Toggling this option might help.

It was after this that I thought perhaps I could disable DPI scaling for Visual Studio 2013. Windows Forms development on a system with a non-standard DPI is ridiculous, because the designer actually incorporates the system DPI scaling into the form, then scales it on the target system. It is, IMO, an absolutely ludicrous setup because it means that nothing I compile will work on my co-workers and testers systems. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to resolve that. there is no compatibility tab for devenv presumably because it has an embedded manifest, and adding to the appcompat registry directly didn’t work either. I guess I’ll have to either use my laptop for development or only build from there, which also a nightmare. Make changes, test on this system,->Commit->update on laptop, resolve conflicts, rebuild, test again,->deploy. And my laptop is slow. To make matters worse, if I buy a new laptop, it will probably also have a high DPI due to a large screen resolution… It’s a bit of an issue for the affluent who have large resolutions and super-new computers and laptops that can use them, but it adds a lot of annoying overhead to otherwise basic tasks.

My only condolence is that as long as I don’t actually change the designer, I can rebuild on my desktop system without issue. Once I do, though, I need to open it on my laptop and readjust the form and resave it and then commit there and update on my desktop to get the DPI scaling to work properly.