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 makes sense, most of that explanation in the screenshot reeks of novices working with something they don’t understand.
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)
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.
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.
But did you read the last line? This isn’t classic control panel, this is the new control panel.
Same shit trying to implement with systems on the backend older than a lot of people using them today I’d imagine
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.
Yea, this doesn’t sound horrible for what it is. Plenty of Linux systems are this bad.
…maybe it’s better that the Windows source code remain closed.
At the same time, I’d love to see the developers of the world glimpse at that eldritch cognitohazard and collectively go insane.
At least modern hardware runs the spaghetti code much better than Windows XP used to run.
i view it less as spaghetti and more as a rat king
Maybe we’ve been misunderstanding what Closed Source really is this whole time?
It’s a codex holding back “eldritch cognitohazard” horrors that the technopriests of Microsoft have captured and tamed into an operating system. Releasing the source would release the beasts into our reality, much like the plot of John Carpenters In the Mouth of Madness.
Well, figured out one good reason for closed source, I guess. Let’s not solve this LeMarchand’s Box.
and people complain about wayland.
I need more IRC screenshots in my life.
Yes but please OCR them because some of us are on mobile and get 1280 ⅔pixels width in landscape mode
Quick OCR scan with minimal clean up, might help some people
[7:52 18 PM] … impressive
[7:52:22 PM] the windows 10 Ul development was the most enormous shitstorm i’ve seen in a while
[17:52:26 PM] how hard is it to move some fucking settings menus
7:52:30 PM many people have pointed out that the Ul is upgraded piecemeal
17:52:34 PM … oh god
17:52:36 PM you have no idea
17:52:37 PM It’s so hard
17:52:41 PM
7:52:43 PM tried to ADD A DROPDOWN
17:52.56 PM DO YOU WANT ME TO DESCRIBE IN EXCRUCIATING DETAIL WHAT IT TAKES TO ADD A DROPDOWN TO THE CONTROL PANEL?
7:53:08 PM find myself overcome with morbid curiosity
7:53:09 PM sit like javafx and fxml?
17:53:14 PM
17:53:15 PM … hahahahahahahaha
17:53:17 PM NO
17:53:42 PM describe to me what it takes to add a dropdown to the control panel.
7:53:47 PM grabs a pillow and brown paper bag
17:54:10 PM control panel or settings?
17:54:14 PM probably some ancient mayan rites
7:54:18 PM lots of goats
7:54:33 PM and registry entries
17:56:54 PM see, first you find the folder that contains the code files for the control panel, and there will be like, 5 of them, each with something like 2000 lines of code, except for one that had 15000
lines of code and I never found out why. Once you find the C++ code file for the specific subsection of the control panel, you must then find the appropriate XAML file that is matched up to this code file, and then search through it to find another dropdown box element you can copy and paste because no one actually knows how any of this works. 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. Then, you must find all the relevont C++ code tying the dropdown you copied, and copy and paste all that code, but this time, modify the hooks sa It gets tied to your new dropdown. Then you have to run through 2 seperate specialized compilers to compile the resource filles, and if ANYTHING GOES WRONG, Uterally ANYTHING, the ONLY ERROR YOU GET BACK is this
1
So after you run around screaming for a DAY because there is no explanation for what the fuck is going on, you give it to your coworker, who discovers that every single number in the resource file must increase by exactly 1, and if there are any holes in those numbers, everything fails completely. Then you can actually finish compiling the special compiler stuff and start bulding the actual codebase through a specialized plugin built for visual studio for the sole purpose of dealing with this fucking codebase, and then you might actually get something to compile.
7:57.42 PM WHAT
7:57:43 PM THE
7:57:46 PM FUCKING
7:57:47 PM FUCK
7:57 59 PM THAT
7:58:04 PM is how you add a dropdown
7:58:07 PM to the control panel
7:58:08 PM … in windows
7:58:20 PM … and people ask me why I quit that job
7:58:36 PM how old is this “specialized plugin”
7:58:39 PM how do they live?
7:58:46 PM from what i can tell about 7-8 years, i think
7:58:59 PM do you have to be dead inside to write code for Windows?
7:59:02 PM
7:59:04 PM think it was based even older IDE they were using so it gets complicated
Can we just compile this kind of shit into a doc to then send to zefrank so he can do a vid on True Facts About Microsoft
7:59:14 PM Yes.
7:59:22 PM rip
7:59:36 PM again it is hard for me to even explain how any of htis works, because most people there don’t even know how it works
7:59:39 PM
7:59:43 PM
7:59:44 PM they’re bootstrapping shit on more shit
if mojang can say “fuck the modders”
See, you don’t understand, they keep trying and failing miserably
Isn’t the legacy control panel codebase deprecated tho?
microsoft needs to make like mojang and just haul ass to an entirely new codebase
7:59:51 PM … then microsoft can say “fuck the software devs” just as well.
7:59:55 PM
8:00:02 PM For example, lets take the build system
8:00:04 PM
8:00:09 PM … Because of Settings.appx
8:00:21 PM “deprecated” is just a fucking label basically
8:00:27 PM shit still uh
8:00:30 PM Yes, that was the new control panel
8:00:30 PM well it doesn’t “work”
8:00:34 PM and it’s not “usable”
that was the “new” codebase
but it’s
8:00:35 PM that’s why it was in XAML
8:00:37 PM
8:00:34 PM
8:00:36 PM] Oh my
8:00:37 PM
8:00:38 PM
8:00:45 PM
8:00:46 PM)… i’m not
means “you shouldnt use it but if you do it’s all k”
accessible…?
you think i’m describing legacy code here
8:00:53 PM]… this is me trying to add a dropdown to the windows 10 NEW CONTROL PANEL
thanks guy!
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.
Is this real? It’s funny af, even if it’s not real, but does anyone know if it is?
There is/was a new Windows 10 Control panel? I thought that was just the Settings app.
The settings app is the new control panel. There’s just also the legacy control panel that they’ve been trying to remove for years. It’s such a shit show that I’ve memorized the run string for the applets I have to use frequently, because it’s a fucking nightmare trying to remember where they moved this in which version of the os.
The thing with the Control panel (speaking as a former Windows user up until a year ago) was its consistency. Since the Aero era things have remained in more-or-less the same place. Sure, some things got added, some renamed and some deleted, but the basics I needed (mouse sensitivity, battery settings on the laptop, the Add/remove software page, search indexing, printers) has all stayed in more or less the same place.
Then 10 happened. And sure, Settings was great for a lot of stuff. But when Settings didn’t have the option (or I lost my nerves trying to find it), Control Panel was the way to go. I’d find what I needed pretty much instantly, since was always one of the same 20-odd things I need.
Even then, everything just seemed faster in Control panel. Was it more responsive? Were there less animations? Were more things crammed into one screen so less clicking and scrolling was involved? Is it just my imagination?
Honestly, I don’t know.
By the time I got used to the new Settings app, one of the big Windows 10 makeovers happened and jumbled up about 10% of Settings. Objectively not much, but just enough to irritate.
And now with 11, they not only made Settings unrecognizable, they also cranked the spyware up to, well, 11. And there’s no Control Panel to default on when in doubt (or fuming with rage).
All in all, while Control Panel wan’t what kept me on Windows, 11 losing it did ease the transition, since it meant having to learn a new way of doing things either way. Might as well make it a way that hopefully won’t change once a random design exec decides “this is ugly and it has to go”.
Honestly, KDE Plasma’s Settings are where it’s at. It’s right between the functional and informstional density of Control panel and the simplicity, visual appeal and saner structure of Settings. Shame it uses Qt, which from what I hear, is god-awful as far as UI toolchains go.
I have worked with Qt, it’s not that bad to be honest.
Keep them memorized. The old tools just work, even if MICROS~1 tries to hide them and replace them with useless crap apps.
There’s both. It’s just the Windows 7 control panel, basically.
Well that was interesting to read
