{"id":15103,"date":"2010-02-02T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-02T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2010\/02\/02\/microspeak-future-proofing\/"},"modified":"2010-02-02T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-02T07:00:00","slug":"microspeak-future-proofing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20100202-00\/?p=15103","title":{"rendered":"Microspeak: Future-proofing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It has been <a href=\"http:\/\/www.miketodd.net\/encyc\/lingo.htm\"> famously said<\/a> that England and the United States are two countries separated by a common language. <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2008\/12\/16\/9222933.aspx\"> The same holds true for Microspeak<\/a>.\n In the Redmond dialect of Microspeak, we talk about <i>extensibility<\/i>: Designing a system with specific points where features can be added in the future, often by outside parties. For example, an example of an <i>extensibility point<\/i> in the shell  would be a context menu handler or a namespace extension.\n In the Reading dialect of Microspeak, the term for this is <i>future-proofing<\/i>.\n On the other hand, if you use the term <i>future-proofing<\/i> in Redmond, people will interpret it differently. In Redmond, <i>future-proofing<\/i> means designing a system so that it continues to function without alteration, even if something happens in the future. (For example, one example of future-proofing&mdash;in the Redmond sense of the term&mdash;would be using a function like <code>SHGetSpecialFolderPath<\/code> instead of hard-coding the path to a directory.)<\/p>\n<p> <b>Update<\/b>: Some folks have taken issue with this definition, and I will have to defer to their local knowledge. I get my reports on the Reading dialect of Microspeak from my contacts there, so it&#8217;s possible that they were mistaken, or that the usage was peculiar to their workgroup and incorrectly extrapolated to the entire dialect. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It has been famously said that England and the United States are two countries separated by a common language. The same holds true for Microspeak. In the Redmond dialect of Microspeak, we talk about extensibility: Designing a system with specific points where features can be added in the future, often by outside parties. For example, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[105,26],"class_list":["post-15103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-microspeak","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>It has been famously said that England and the United States are two countries separated by a common language. The same holds true for Microspeak. In the Redmond dialect of Microspeak, we talk about extensibility: Designing a system with specific points where features can be added in the future, often by outside parties. For example, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15103\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}