Saturday, August 01, 2009

Am I a stupid user?

Sometimes I wonder if I am to stupid to use some tools or if the GUI is not like that as it should be. I am using Visual Studio 2005 now for several years and some weeks ago I tried to change the height of the client area of a normal combobox inside resourse editor. The reason was that I added around 20 text items from code and wanted them to be visible all at the same time in the dropdown list. Well in the Properties Window there is no such attribute to set and when I clicked the combobox it looks like this:

But it was only possible to change the width of the combox (blue spots) and not the height (white spots)! I just thought "Oh man what's going on... this cannot be true - I am going nuts!".
My first idea was to change the height from source code using MoveWindow etc. - but in total this required more than 5 lines of code (with variable declaration and nice layout) just to change the height of a dropdown list of a combobox...?! This is not that developer-friendly as I expected it...

Or was I just too stupid to use resourse editor - of course this was the case. But I found the solution only accidently. Instead of clicking directly on the combobox item, I clicked directly on the small button with the arrow downwards at the right side of the textbox, and suddenly it looked like that:

Now it was possible... that easy!
Although I feel some kind ashamed to waste so much time for such a trivial problem, I thought posting my lousy problem may help also some other 'stupid user' facing the same 'challenge' ;-)