EditBox Margin in .NET 2.0 still not fixed

November 18, 2005 @ 5:27 am

A while back I posted an issue that causes problems with EditBoxes having funky margins. I posted a bug report and talked to somebody on the WinForms team back and forth and they assured me this issue was fixed. The bug report however came back not reproducible. I’m not sure how it could possibly not be reproducible. Somebody needs some glasses or something.

So, conveniently this shitty behavior is still with us in .NET 2.0. Here’s a 2.0 WinForm:

Notice the EditBox text has a margin while the textbox does not. These are plain TextBoxes on very simple WinForm. Nothing funky.

It bugs me no end that issues that actually were reported during the beta or even before are not fixed. I remember having a conversation I think with Mike Harsh and was assured that this particular issue was fixed for 2.0. Apparently not.

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re: EditBox Margin in .NET 2.0 still not fixed
by Jeff Atwood November 18, 2005 @ 9:39 am

Rick, I can't reproduce this either. What do you mean when you say "EditBox"? I don't see an "EditBox" in the VS 2005 toolbox.

I tried all the controls listed in your bug posting ..

> The padding for TextBox, Combobox, DateTimePicker and others are all inconsistent and look unprofessional with their default padding set.

.. and the first characters line up just fine in my VS 2005 winforms sample app! Well, except for the DateTimePicker, but that thing has always been weird even in VS.NET 2003

re: EditBox Margin in .NET 2.0 still not fixed
by Andrew MacNeill November 18, 2005 @ 12:04 pm

Uh....who can't reproduce it?

Even I could do it - and I just cracked open a brand new VS Standard on my Win XP SP2 box earlier this week.

It's not as pronounced as Rick's example - but it's definitely there and this might be a clue.

Rick - what font do you use?

If I use MS Sans Serif, I don't see a problem. But when I try to use Verdana, the difference is off by ONE pixel.

Could that be it?

re: EditBox Margin in .NET 2.0 still not fixed
by Jeff Atwood November 18, 2005 @ 1:23 pm

http://blogs.vertigosoftware.com/photos/jatwood/images/1646/original.aspx

It's to-the-pixel perfect on my box. And since you're questioning my competency, I'll respectfully point out that the MS dev assigned to this bug couldn't reproduce it either.

re: EditBox Margin in .NET 2.0 still not fixed
by Jeff Atwood November 18, 2005 @ 1:27 pm

> But when I try to use Verdana, the difference is off by ONE pixel.

Bingo. Change the form font, and I see the behavior, but ONLY FOR MULTI-LINE TEXT BOXES.

Too bad Rick's original bug didn't specify this level of detail, or it might have actually gotten fixed.

re: EditBox Margin in .NET 2.0 still not fixed
by Rick Strahl November 18, 2005 @ 2:16 pm

Jeff,

<g>

Well, yes, I change the font of every form I use so I didn't even consider the font. I'll go amend the bug report - hopefully this will at some point get addressed.

The point was that somebody from Microsoft could reproduce it and told me the issue was addressed and that is the bummer. I think it was in a news forum but I can't remember because this was early on in the Alpha stage. I didn't give it much thought after that.

+++ Rick ---

re: EditBox Margin in .NET 2.0 still not fixed
by Rick Strahl November 18, 2005 @ 2:23 pm

Andrew,

Interesting. Using Tahoma the margin offset is much bigger. I tend to use Tahoma 8 for all my forms which is what we see above and that's more like 5 pixels off...

Thanks for catching that. I've ammended the report...

re: EditBox Margin in .NET 2.0 still not fixed
by David M. Kean December 04, 2005 @ 6:41 pm

Rick,

You will need to open the report (simply Edit and change status to Reopened) to get Microsoft to relook at it. I've found they won't respond to comments once the issue has been closed.

Weird WinForms MultiLine TextBox and Scrollbar Controls issue - Rick Strahl's Web Log
by Rick Strahl's Web Log October 15, 2006 @ 6:46 am

I've run into a very strange problem that I cannot solve in WinForms. I have some forms in my application where any control that has a scrollbar has a 5 point or so margin in the controls client area. For example a text box that is multi-line (and thus has a vertical scroll bar) looks like it has an indent compared to a single line text box.

DotNetSlackers: EditBox Margin in .NET 2.0 still not fixed
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