Visual Studio Form designer started displaying my form like it is zoomed in

Question

I am running Visual Studio 2019 winforms app (C#). If I recall correctly I might of been adjusting the size of a font used in a label when shortly after the form appear to zoom to approximately 3X the size. When I build and run the resulting program also appears like it is zoomed in. At some point the form's width decided to be 3340 (or so), but even changing it back to the original 1000 width that I wanted does not appear to change the 'zoom level'.

I saw some random closed posts talk about zoom level in visual studio but that only seems to apply in code view, not designer view. There was also something about CTRLSHIFT +/- giving your the ability of zoom in and out of a form in designer view, but this feature does not seem to even work for me.

I have loaded an different project and its form seems total normal, so it does not seem to be and IDE issue. I must confess I am blowing a gasket over this.

My visual studio has "Save auto recover information" set to every 5 minutes and "keep autorecover information set to 7 day" but there seems to be no information out there on how to say go back 1 day. I currently do not use any kind of source control, so I am not sure if the autorecover is separate from that or not.

See description above for what I have tried to 'fix this' including rebuilding the project. And no, I do not have source control.

Answer 1

This default setting of Form is likely the reason you're seeing that behavior. You can read about the AutoScaleMode enum property in Microsoft Documentation.

Since you don't have source control (you know that GitHub is integrated with Visual Studio and the account is free, right?) you could try setting the forms Font size back to its default of 9 pts and see if that has any value toward recovering things.

Also, font sizes can always be set on individual controls (which inherit these properties from their container by default if not set). Personally I almost never change the default font setting on the main app window unless it's at the very start of a project, for the very reasons you're stating.