Thanks to Chris K.’s blog post
I finally found a nice solution to open an RDP connection
to a remote host from my HiDPI laptop. Basically, the solution
is to copy mstsc.exe and set its AppCompatFlag to make it
DPI unaware:
1cd C:\Windows\System32
2copy mstsc.exe mstsc2.exe
3copy en-us\mstsc.exe.mui en-us\mstsc2.exe.mui
4reg add "HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers" \
5 /t REG_SZ /v "C:\Windows\System32\mstsc2.exe" /d "~ DPIUNAWARE" /f
Interesting side-effects
When running the modified instance of the remote desktop client
mstsc2.exe with one of my servers, I could no longer execute
one of my .NET command line applications. It crashed mysteriously
very early in its startup code.
After investigating, I found that setting the width of the console could indeed throw an exception:
1// Can throw ArgumentOutOfRangeException
2System.Console.SetWindowSize (width, System.Console.WindowHeight);
Hack, works only when using an English locale
In order to solve this issue, I added a hack in order to limit the width of the console to what the exception reports; in its error message, it says maximum window size of 160 (for instance). It’s a hack, but it works in my environment.
1try
2{
3 System.Console.SetWindowSize (width, System.Console.WindowHeight);
4}
5catch (System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException ex)
6{
7 var find = "maximum window size of ";
8 var message = ex.Message;
9 var pos = message.IndexOf (find);
10
11 if (pos < 0) throw;
12
13 message = message.Substring (pos + find.Length);
14 pos = message.IndexOf (' ');
15
16 if (pos < 0) throw;
17
18 message = message.Substring (0, pos);
19
20 width = int.Parse (message, System.Globalization.CultureInfo.InvariantCulture);
21 System.Console.SetWindowSize (width, System.Console.WindowHeight);
22}