7 ms·

Great article. I love Windows deep dives—both because of the supposed inaccessibility of Windows (clearly not true), and because Windows is something I've daily

Great article. I love Windows deep dives—both because of the supposed inaccessibility of Windows (clearly not true), and because Windows is something I've daily-driven for 23 years, and I've come to really appreciate. If only MS could get its act straight, clean up its UI framework mess (WinUI, WPF, WinForms, Win32, WinRT, MAUI... sheesh) and stop applying stupid regressive updates and dark patterns.

viraptor 4y ago
> because of the supposed inaccessibility of Windows (clearly not true) It's a mixed bag and it's far from not true. You get great tools for performance debugging, you get some system symbols, got get system wide tracing... Unless you don't get the symbols. And even then, you often find the element which doesn't work properly and... that's all. Now you know what fails, but not why and you can't do anything about it anyway. I keep getting disappointed like that by windows over and over. I find what fails and it doesn't actually change anything.
- delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
  The debugging tools and symbols are mostly available, but that we can't verify why these bugs happen or fix them is down to the closed-source nature of Windows, then, isn't it? Another pipe dream to add to the pile: open-source Windows.
  - LelouBil 4y ago
    I am 100% sure it will happen someday.
    - ptx 4y ago
      It's been in the process of happening, albeit very slowly, since 1996: https://reactos.org/ https://reactos.org/
      - delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
        I've heard of ReactOS, and it's not what I meant—the 'pipe dream' was Microsoft itself open-sourcing Windows and all its components, from the NT kernel to every single tiny program in Windows, like the various MMC plug-ins, Aero shell, Explorer, Task Manager, etc. It's highly unlikely, ergo 'pipe dream'.
        LelouBil 4y ago
        The new terminal, and more importantly conhost [0] are open sourced, that's why I believe some day far in the future it will happen. [0] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal https://github.com/microsoft/terminal
- toast0 4y ago
  > Now you know what fails, but not why and you can't do anything about it anyway. Binary patching is kind of a pain to do on system files these days, but it is possible. Usually not worth the trouble to dig in even more to do Microsoft's job for them, but sometimes it might be.
mrguyorama 4y ago
MS desperately needs a strong QA department back, but they seem uninterested in doing so.
glonq 4y ago
> WinUI, WPF, WinForms, Win32, WinRT, MAUI Literally the reason why I retired from developing rich/native windows apps. I also got burned when they pulled the rug out from under Silverlight. Is MFC still a thing? Don't forget to add that to the list!

viraptor 4y ago

> because of the supposed inaccessibility of Windows (clearly not true) It's a mixed bag and it's far from not true. You get great tools for performance debugging, you get some system symbols, got get system wide tracing... Unless you don't get the symbols. And even then, you often find the element which doesn't work properly and... that's all. Now you know what fails, but not why and you can't do anything about it anyway. I keep getting disappointed like that by windows over and over. I find what fails and it doesn't actually change anything.

delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
The debugging tools and symbols are mostly available, but that we can't verify why these bugs happen or fix them is down to the closed-source nature of Windows, then, isn't it? Another pipe dream to add to the pile: open-source Windows.
- LelouBil 4y ago
  I am 100% sure it will happen someday.
  - ptx 4y ago
    It's been in the process of happening, albeit very slowly, since 1996: https://reactos.org/ https://reactos.org/
    - delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
      I've heard of ReactOS, and it's not what I meant—the 'pipe dream' was Microsoft itself open-sourcing Windows and all its components, from the NT kernel to every single tiny program in Windows, like the various MMC plug-ins, Aero shell, Explorer, Task Manager, etc. It's highly unlikely, ergo 'pipe dream'.
      - LelouBil 4y ago
        The new terminal, and more importantly conhost [0] are open sourced, that's why I believe some day far in the future it will happen. [0] https://github.com/microsoft/terminal https://github.com/microsoft/terminal
toast0 4y ago
> Now you know what fails, but not why and you can't do anything about it anyway. Binary patching is kind of a pain to do on system files these days, but it is possible. Usually not worth the trouble to dig in even more to do Microsoft's job for them, but sometimes it might be.

mrguyorama 4y ago

MS desperately needs a strong QA department back, but they seem uninterested in doing so.

glonq 4y ago

> WinUI, WPF, WinForms, Win32, WinRT, MAUI Literally the reason why I retired from developing rich/native windows apps. I also got burned when they pulled the rug out from under Silverlight. Is MFC still a thing? Don't forget to add that to the list!