Creating a responsive layout

One of the most powerful features of WinUI, compared to other Microsoft UI frameworks, such as WPF and Windows Forms, is the built-in support for responsive layouts. Even if WinUI applications are tailored mainly for desktop devices, there are many scenarios where it's important to let the application scale properly: big screens, monitors with high resolution, applications running in a smaller window, and so on. In these situations, your application must react accordingly, so that the content presented to the user can always be meaningful.

When building the layout of your application, there are some aspects that Windows will take care of for you, and some others that must be manually tweaked by the developer.

Let's start by analyzing the first category.

Using effective pixels

One of the biggest challenges when using technologies such as WPF or Windows Forms is that all the sizes you set are translated into screen pixels. For example...