I wanna believe that this is fake.
But I expect it is not.
I’m now wondering if microsoft still even has the legacy control panel code.
I have no way of verifying this is real, but I wholeheartedly believe it.
Which control panel? There’s like 20 of them and a new worse one gets added every other year.
OH MY F… GOD! I knew it is witchcraft but I didn’t knew that is is so awful!
… This seems like standard GUI stuff. The interface component defined by some markup, with a hook to some programmatic behavior, and perhaps a corresponding resource ID
So that’s why they shipped like every past systems’ control windows with every new version. Not for people’s convenience. Because of spaghett
Nobody toucha my spaghett
The “True Facts About Microsoft” and Zefrank reference got me :D
I’ve heard an ex microsoft employee said in a blog once that the windows team has no seniors. Anyone who has worked there for one or two years has left for better employers. Nobody knows how to refactor or maintain old codebases, so instead, they just write new things on top of the old things. The windows kernel has hardly changed since XP.
This sounds 100% credible, based on the outcomes we can see
This makes sense, most of that explanation in the screenshot reeks of novices working with something they don’t understand.
Copying and pasting a current example and changing the names… yep.
Instead of making it worse you could extract it to a new file. Make an interface. Write a unit test. Anything.
The guy wonders why the file is 15k lines long and then describes exactly why.
Right? Like my dude, bare minimum at least write down those steps in a text document so you can reference it the next time you have to add something. Bonus points for putting it on some shared internal wiki or whatever Microsoft uses.
pretty much every windows GUI framework is trash or a pain in the ass to deal with except for Avalonia (my beloved), but it’s more cross platform.
I’m not sure if this is 100% real but it very well could be. although imo makes me think of skill issue (not because the system makes sense, but these problems don’t really seem like problems to me, just minor set backs)
This is why everything is a goddamn web app now.
I haven’t done much with UI in general, but the one time I thought of making some UI stuff in windows I gave up.
Even modifying an existing .net program someone else made for a feature I wanted was a nightmare.
Yep, I was shocked to see that there is no defacto 1st party framework and during my time searching online I found lots of “use x, use y, no y is dead and none uses it, no x is terrible” which is how I found Avalonia.
I still don’t think there’s a solid Windows gui framework, but I haven’t looked in years.
Thanks Ballmer for QA.
Well that was interesting to read
Then you have to go into a resource file and find a very specific resource ID for your control panel string, and create a new resource ID to me it to.
Ah yes the joys of working with Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), Back in the day I supported a VS6.0 application, you have room for 65535 UI elements in an application (Including DLL’s) I had to split the ID’s up in ranges to enable adding new elements in a sane way.
I don’t think this is legit because even as I was reading it, I was expecting it to sound a lot worse than it ended up sounding. Like, it didn’t sound great or anything, but it didn’t sound nearly as fucked up as I would expect firsthand descriptions of piled-on legacy code to sound after almost 50 fucking years.
Seriously, it doesn’t sound great, but it sounds about what you might expect wiring up a new UI widget in WPF or whatever the latest thing for native Windows is. Sounds like what would happen if you started developing a Windows app using the Microsoft scaffolding and never applied any kind of software architecture beyond that and it just grew and grew into a big ball of mud. Exactly what I would expect given the quality of so many of their frameworks, and I say that as a professional dotnet software engineer.
The complete lack or error reporting in the compiler is a surprise though.
True, that is surprising and makes everything worse. It’s probably controlled by a setting that none of those engineers knows how to change, based on the lack of knowledge described here.
Yea, this doesn’t sound horrible for what it is. Plenty of Linux systems are this bad.
Plenty of UI applications* are this bad
And “the specific resource ID” is almost certainly for localization of the text
What cracked me up was all that copying blocks of code “because no one knows how anything works”.
That reeks of novices copying code without bothering to read it well, and since this work method is horrendous, no one stays enough to stablish a proper knowledge base.
But did you read the last line? This isn’t classic control panel, this is the new control panel.
Sounds like classic junior engineer shit. “Let’s do a big rewrite!” Followed by everything going to shit because they don’t how to create good maintainable software architecture and for whatever reason there weren’t enough senior engineers around to show them the way.
Same shit trying to implement with systems on the backend older than a lot of people using them today I’d imagine
Yeah this is classic legacy code.
Complicated code is when 700 projects are all entangled and when you add a 3D bar for measuring purposes (it was just a bar like 100 nanometers long so you could get a feel for size in 3D scans, in the 3D viewer), the up (not the down) mouse scroll stopped working for sliders in all the 2D GUIs…
That is crappy code and I was there when we got that bug (Avizo software).
W H A T
Is this real? It’s funny af, even if it’s not real, but does anyone know if it is?
