A customer observed that the Last Used On<\/i> column in the Programs and Features<\/i> control panel doesn’t appear by default, and if they turn it on, the column is simply blank. The customer wanted to confirm this behavior and asked if there was a way to obtain the Last Used On<\/i> information by some other means.<\/p>\n
I thought it was odd that the customer asked us to confirm what they were seeing. “When I hold my arms above my head, my shoulder hurts. Can you confirm that?” Um, it’s your shoulder. We can’t tell you how your shoulder feels.<\/p>\n
I’m guessing that what they wanted was not a confirmation that their eyes were not deceiving them, but rather a confirmation that the behavior is intentional.<\/p>\n
And yes, it is intentional.<\/p>\n
The Last Used On<\/i> information was always a guess, and a really dodgy one at that. As we noted earlier, if the application itself does not provide the information, the Programs and Features<\/i> control panel runs some really coarse heuristics to find the program<\/a>, consisting mostly of matching words in the program name in the Programs and Features<\/i> control panel against the words in the program name in the Start menu.<\/p>\n There is no way to provide Last Used On<\/i> information in the application registration (which makes sense since that is a dynamic concept not know at registration time), so for the Last Used On<\/i> property, the system is always guessing.<\/p>\n The heuristic is bad, and it eventually was recognized as so laughably bad that it simply wasn’t worth trying.<\/p>\n The column still exists in case there are programs which programmatically extract data from the Programs and Features<\/i> control panel. They will still have a column to manipulate, but the column never contains any useful information.<\/p>\n The customer insisted upon an alternative mechanism that gave them the Last Used On<\/i> information. I got the impression that they use this information to decide which programs their employees are using.<\/p>\n