{"id":27803,"date":"2007-03-01T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-03-01T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2007\/03\/01\/if-you-have-to-ask-youre-probably-doing-something-wrong\/"},"modified":"2007-03-01T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2007-03-01T10:00:00","slug":"if-you-have-to-ask-youre-probably-doing-something-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20070301-00\/?p=27803","title":{"rendered":"If you have to ask, you&#039;re probably doing something wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you have to ask about various operating system limits, you&#8217;re probably doing something wrong.\n If you&#8217;re <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2003\/12\/18\/44379.aspx\"> nesting windows more than 50 levels deep<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2003\/12\/30\/46594.aspx\"> nesting menus more than 25 levels deep<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2004\/06\/21\/161375.aspx\"> creating a dialog box with more than 65535 controls<\/a>, or nesting tree-view items more than 255 levels deep, then your user interface design is in serious need of rethought, because you just created a usability nightmare.\n If you have to ask about <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2005\/07\/29\/444912.aspx\"> the maximum number of threads a process can create<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2003\/12\/10\/56028.aspx\"> the maximum length of a command line<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2006\/07\/06\/657868.aspx\"> the maximum size of an environment block<\/a> or <a href=\"http:\/\/support.microsoft.com\/kb\/256986\/\"> the maximum amount of data you can store in the registry<\/a>, then you probably have some rather serious design flaws in your program.\n I&#8217;m not saying that knowing the limits isn&#8217;t useful, but in many cases, <a href=\"http:\/\/listserv.linguistlist.org\/cgi-bin\/wa?A2=ind0405c&amp;L=ads-l&amp;P=12106\"> if you have to ask, you can&#8217;t afford it<\/a>.\n <b>Nitpicker&#8217;s corner<\/b><\/p>\n<p> Notice that I said &#8220;probably&#8221;. In my experience, probably 90% of the people who ask what the limit is have either bumped into it or are considering a design that will. The fact that you folks can come up with suggestions for the other 10% doesn&#8217;t invalidate my point. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you have to ask about various operating system limits, you&#8217;re probably doing something wrong. If you&#8217;re nesting windows more than 50 levels deep or nesting menus more than 25 levels deep or creating a dialog box with more than 65535 controls, or nesting tree-view items more than 255 levels deep, then your user interface [&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":[26],"class_list":["post-27803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>If you have to ask about various operating system limits, you&#8217;re probably doing something wrong. If you&#8217;re nesting windows more than 50 levels deep or nesting menus more than 25 levels deep or creating a dialog box with more than 65535 controls, or nesting tree-view items more than 255 levels deep, then your user interface [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27803","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=27803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27803\/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=27803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}