Centering controls within a form in .NET (Winforms)?

user47741 picture user47741 · Jan 29, 2009 · Viewed 183.9k times · Source

I'm trying to center a fixed size control within a form.

Out of interest, is there a non-idiotic way of doing this? What I really want is something analogous to the text-align css property.

At the moment, I'm setting the padding property of the surrounding form to a suitable size and setting the Dock property of the control to fill.

Answer

splattne picture splattne · Jan 29, 2009

You could achieve this with the use of anchors. Or more precisely the non use of them.

Controls are anchored by default to the top left of the form which means when the form size will be changed, their distance from the top left side of the form will remain constant. If you change the control anchor to bottom left, then the control will keep the same distance from the bottom and left sides of the form when the form if resized.

Turning off the anchor in a direction will keep the control centered in that direction when resizing.

NOTE: Turning off anchoring via the properties window in VS2015 may require entering None, None (instead of default Top,Left)