I wanna believe that this is fake.
But I expect it is not.
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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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.
I'm now wondering if microsoft still even has the legacy control panel code.
... 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
OH MY F... GOD! I knew it is witchcraft but I didn't knew that is is so awful!
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.
I don't think anybody gets paid enough to write that down. In fact, they might get punished for wasting company time. They could open source it and people would automatically fix these things. Who knows.
Or write a tool that can do all these steps for you, reliably!
The “True Facts About Microsoft” and Zefrank reference got me :D
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.
well, no. everything is a god damn web app because everything runs browsers.
so why write native (device) applications if the device can run a browser ? just write code for the browser, which also runs on desktop. now you have a cross platform app without needing 5 different teams
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.
...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.
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.
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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 of 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.
My guess is that a stack trace is being generated, but something further down the chain is consuming it, realizes there's an error, and just throws -1 instead of the stack trace itself.
Something like
try {
compileThisDamnProgram()
} catch Exception {
return -1
}
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.
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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
-
receive text over the network
-
render text into pixels
-
mangle pixels through some convoluted Fourier transform to decrease quality
-
run even more complex pattern matching algorithm on mangled pixels to guess text represented
Can we add AI somewhere down that line?
AI is often used to make the last step produce text that is closer to English. Whether that helps very much depends.
Quick OCR scan with minimal clean up, might help some people Edit: Cleanup work and colour coding thanks to ChaoticNeutralCzech@feddit.org
[7:52 18 PM] 🟦 impressive
[7:52:22 PM] 🟩 the windows 10 UI development was the most enormous shitstorm i've seen in a while
[7:52:26 PM] 🟥 how hard is it to move some fucking settings menus
[7:52:30 PM] 🟩 many people have pointed out that the UI is upgraded piecemeal
[7:52:34 PM] 🟩 oh god
[7:52:36 PM] 🟩 you have no idea
[7:52:37 PM] 🟩 it's so hard
[7:52:41 PM] 🟥 whyyyyyyyy
[7:52:43 PM] 🟩 i tried to ADD A DROPDOWN
[7:52.56 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] 🟥 I find myself overcome with morbid curiosity
[7:53:09 PM] 🟦 is it like javafx and fxml?
[7:53:14 PM] 🟩 hahahahahahaha
[7:53:15 PM] 🟩 hahahahahahahaha
[7:53:17 PM] 🟩 NO
[7:53:42 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
[7:54:10 PM] 🟦 control panel or settings?
[7:54:14 PM] 🟪 probably some ancient mayan rites
[7:54:18 PM] 🟪 lots of goats
[7:54:33 PM] 🟦 and registry entries
[7:56:54 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, literally ANYTHING, the ONLY ERROR YOU GET BACK is this:
-1So 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
[7:58:05 PM] 🟫 >microcucks
==CENSORED==[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] 🟫 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
[7:59:04 PM] 🟩 I think it was based even older IDE they were using so it gets complicated
[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] 🟥 microsoft needs to make like mojang and just haul ass to an entirely new codebase
[7:59:43 PM] 🟦 they're bootstrapping shit on more shit
[7:59:44 PM] 🟥 if mojang can say "fuck the modders"
[7:59:51 PM] 🟥 then microsoft can say "fuck the software devs" just as well.
[7:59:55 PM] 🟩 See, you don't understand, they keep trying and failing miserably
[8:00:02 PM] 🟩 For example, lets take the build system
[8:00:04 PM] 🟨 Isn't the legacy control panel codebase deprecated tho?
[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"
[8:00:34 PM] 🟩 that was the "new" codebase
[8:00:35 PM] 🟥 but it's
[8:00:36 PM] 🟨 Oh my
[8:00:37 PM] 🟩 that's why it was in XAML
[8:00:37 PM] 🟦 means "you shouldnt use it but if you do it's all k"
[8:00:38 PM] 🟥 accessible...?
[8:00:45 PM] 🟩 you think i'm describing legacy code here
[8:00:46 PM] 🟩 i'm not
[8:00:53 PM] 🟩 ... this is me trying to add a dropdown to the windows 10 NEW CONTROL PANEL**___**
Good human!
Seriously, though; thank you! Not for my mobile viewing pleasures, but for findability and accessibility!
I cleaned it up a bit and added color. You can replace yours with the following and I'll delete this so that we don't take up so much vertical space.
Edit: done
Thats great work thank you, ive updated and credited you in my comment
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and people complain about wayland.
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