Zooming in the visual studio form designer

Question

I'm using the Visual Studio 2013 form designer to edit a form. The size of the form in the designer window is too big so I want to zoom out.

In applications like Photoshop or Blend I could (among other things) use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-0 to fit the design to the screen.

In Visual Studio how do I zoom out in the form design window?

Solution

The Windows Forms designer doesn't zoom. The WPF one does because it's vector based, but WinForms is pixel based you don't get the zooming.

If you've got multiple monitors you can drag the designer to a second screen and work with it that way, or you can press Alt+Shift+Enter to toggle full screen and work with it that way.

Comments

[dumbledad]

Thanks Richard. What do you mean by "pixel based"? Adobe Illustrator is for authoring vector based work while Photoshop is for authoring pixel based work. They both allow zooming.

[Richard Banks]

Pixel based meaning the controls and elements are defined with specific widths and heights measured in pixels, and are rendered accordingly. They won't scale as resolution scales and aren't easy to zoom since you can really only zoom in large steps if you want to retain fidelity. i.e. 100%, 200%, 400%, etc. The designer could implement a more graduated zooming feature, but the loss of precision and the antialiasing needed would make working with winforms and doing pixel perfect layouts impossibly annoying. It's not such a problem with graphics programs which is why they offer it.

[MajesticRa]

I want to see pixels

[OneWorld]

I decreased my screen resolution. That's my zoom feature ;)