installer Windows installer has poor dpi scaling

Steps to reproduce

Execute Installer on a Windows machine with a high resolution and dpi scaling turned on. In my case 1080p and 125% scaling.

Expected behavior

Clean interface with sharp font

Actual behavior

very blurry fonts during installation

Environment data

dotnet --info output:

.NET Command Line Tools (1.0.1)

Product Information: Version: 1.0.1 Commit SHA-1 hash: 005db40cd1

Runtime Environment: OS Name: Windows OS Version: 10.0.14393 OS Platform: Windows RID: win10-x64 Base Path: C:\Program Files\dotnet\sdk\1.0.1

Mar 13 '17 13:03 damianon

Is this something we could tackle for .NET 5? Most of our customers should have high DPI monitors now and the installer screen looks quite unwelcoming this way :-(

Mar 27 '20 16:03 terrajobst

From @robmen on Twitter:

wixstdba (the Bundle UI provided for free with the WiX Toolset) has not been taught high DPI yet. That hasn't been a priority for us @firegiantco or any of our customers.

So unless we're willing to roll our own UI, it's probably cost prohibitive for .NET 5.

Mar 27 '20 17:03 terrajobst

You don't have to go as far as to roll your own UI. Someone just needs to teach thmutil (the UI technology wixstdba.dll uses) high-DPI. That can be done by volunteer effort or approaching @firegiantco to contract the work.

Just because it hasn't been our priority (aka: not @firegiantco's customers' priority) doesn't mean it shouldn't be done. :smile:

Mar 27 '20 17:03 robmen

If you override the DPI scaling mode for the installer in explorer's properties, the installer scales up just fine: I'm not sure if you can opt into this mode with a manifest like you can with the older DPI awareness modes, but it would be ideal. I tried setting it to fully DPI aware (like what you get with a .manifest) but it doesn't scale to system DPI, for some reason the font sizes are all in pixels.