Something VERY weird is happening. If I make a window and turn own its built-in scroll bars, then scroll around and place controls in run-time, I noticed that the x and y coordinates of the controls are relative to the window coordinates, but as it appears on the screen.

In other words, if I start at horizontal (or vertical) position 0, then place a control 100 pixels from the left (or top), its x (or y) coordinate is 100. But then if I scroll 300 pixels to the right (or down) and place another control 100 pixels from the left (or top), it will also have an x (or y) coordinate of 100, even though it's actually 300 pixels right (or below) of the other one, and the coordinate should be 400!

This makes it impossible to judge in absolute terms, within the entire scrolling range, where exactly any control exists! What gives???

And no, I can't post source code, and don't even have it with me right now.

Well I have turned on a property called "AutoScroll" or something like that, so it automatically moves the controls around when I move the scroll bars. However, I don't think it's actually changing the coordinate properties of the controls when it does so. So when I put it left = 100, then move the scroll bar, the property on the control stays at left = 100.

For that reason, I assumed that the coordinate stored in the control (the left property) would correspond to the position within the scrolled window, not the visual position relative to the window on the screen. It doesn't make any sense how I can have 2 different controls that both have left = 100, and they appear horizontally far apart, just because they were inserted onto the form when the scroll bar was in different positions.

Yes System.Windows.Forms is what I'm using. I'm sorry I didn't say that - I thought it was assumed.

But I think I was already using AutoScrollPosition. Anyway, all I want to do is be able to programmatically place any control at run time, and also be able to draw things (like lines, etc.), and give all of that a left and top (or x and y) position, and have it show up where I want either on the screen or in the "virtual" scrollable space.

But I want it to be consistent, so that if I place 2 different things so that their horizontal positions are both at 100, they don't look half a screen apart horizontally!

None of that actually seems to fix the problem though. Does anyone have a code example of something like what I described?