Designing a tablet PC-optimized application with WPF. Advice needed on aspect ratios

I would appreciate some advice on best practices with my first WPF app (a touchscreen based app with large buttons, custom controls - that will generally run on tablet PCs).

One thing I am curious about is how one deals with different aspect ratios:

The WPF app I am building is a touchscreen-based one, and thus needs to scale from resolution to resolution with custom (i.e. large) xaml-defined controls. However, what if one of the tablet PC's run 1024x768 (ratio 1.3333), and another one runs 1280x800 (ratio 1.60).

That's two very different ratios; one is widescreen and one is clearly not. Perhaps it is best just to design the application in the first place to fit widescreen-type aspect ratios only? (In which case, the non-widescreen screens will see black "bars" on the top and开发者_如何转开发 bottom of the screen.)

What is commonly done? I'd very much like to avoid common pitfalls.

I think you'll find that there are far more widescreen tablets than 4x3 tablets. If you must design for a specific aspect ratio, I'd choose a wide-screen target, and use it as your baseline.

However, with WPF, it's very easy to design interfaces that scale to any aspect - which would be my preference. It'd be better, in my opinion, to allow some portions of your interface to fill space rather than do "black bars".

Ideally, this widescreen fad will go away and we'll return to sane aspect ratios like 4:3.

16:9 is way too awkard in either direction (either scroll left/right or up/down), while 4:3 is useful in both directions. The 16:9 "standard" for viewing at a distance should not havev been adopted for close monitor work.