[nfbcs] Developing Windows Application with Visual Studio

[Joseph C. Lininger]

Hi guys,
I think I asked a generic version of this question a few years ago, but 
honestly I can't remember what suggestions if any people had for it. Now 
I have a more specific question involving Windows software development 
as a blind person. Just so we're clear, my development environment is as 
follows.

* Windows 7
* Visual Studio 2015 or Notepad++ for writing code (I use both depending 
on the situation)
* NVDA screen reader, with access to an older copy of Window-Eyes as a 
backup. NVDA seems to work fine with both VS and NPP.

Alright, now let me tell you about the problem I'm having. The project 
I'm currently working on at work is a system which consists of a bunch 
of custom DLL files, a console application, and a GUI application. The 
entire thing is written in C#. Developing and maintaining the DLLs and 
the console appplication are not a problem. The problem is the GUI.

Does anyone have any tips for placement of GUI elements, both for new 
and existing applications? I could probably ask someone with sight to do 
the GUI building, or at least the layout portion with me wiring 
everything together later, but the more of this I can do independently 
the better. Ideally, I would be able to do all of it and just have a 
sighted person fine tune the look at the end to ensure the controls are 
properly sized and such. I'm planning several follow-on releases of the 
software after this big release, and the GUI may need to change with one 
or more of those. Having someone continuously redoing part of what 
should be my work would not be ideal. I'm having problems keeping 
controls from completely covering other controls, though, which makes it 
hard for even a sighted person to go in and fix it after the fact (since 
they can't see anything I accidentally obscured.) I'm willing to use 
either WinForms or WPF for the GUI design. Right now the application 
uses WinForms, but I can redesign it to use WPF if I need to. I have a 
basic GUI that a previous developer built, but it needs to be redesigned 
so the GUI can take advantage of the new capabilities offered by the system.

Let me finish this email by describing what I've already tried. I 
noticed that all the form designer does is to generate what is actually 
relatively simple (if a bit long-winded) C# code. The form designer 
itself is mostly accessible, aside from the fact there is no way I know 
of to place and size controls without using the mouse. I thought I could 
use the form designer to create the controls (and the code that goes 
with them), then manually edit the generated code to properly position 
and size the controls. The problem is I would have to specify the 
positions and sizes in pixels, and it's proving to be difficult to know 
exactly what values to use for the various properties. It is also hard 
to know what is visible and what isn't. Has anyone by chance solved this 
problem? If so, what techniques did you use and how efficient was it?

Any insights you can offer would be much appreciated.
Joe