March 28th, 2005

When a program asks you a question and then gets upset if you answer it

JeffDav’s story of a program that didn’t like it when he told it where to install reminded me of another program that we dealt with during Windows 95 development. This was a big-name program developed by one of the biggest-of-the-big name software companies. Let’s give this program the imaginary name “LitWare”. Its setup program asked you where you wanted the program to be installed, and it suggested “C:\LITWARE”. If you accepted the default, then everything proceeded normally. However, if you changed the default to anything else, the setup program ran to completion, but the program itself wouldn’t run. Because the program contained the hard-coded path “C:\LITWARE” and insisted that it find its support files in that directory.

At least Jeff’s program realized that it was about to be installed into a directory where it would fail to work!

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Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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