Before you criticise Microsoft Windows…

Think about some of the issues they run into. Sure, Windows is bloated, the Win32 API is full of badly-formed interfaces, but… there’s also a lot of crap programmers around using it and preventing the Windows development team from cleaning up the system properly. So, what would YOU do?

– Let old & misbehaving programs crash? Many people wouldn’t upgrade to Vista.

– Leave the old stuff there? Well, this works once or twice, but after 10 years of Windows, the shit tends to accumulate in large piles. And we’re talking about an animation here, nothing important, but remember, the same thing happens with code…

– Make a "blank" or "dummy" version of the resource, so misbehaving apps look ugly but don’t crash? I suppose this is the way to go: old software still works, but developers are encouraged to behave better.

It’s interesting that the otherwise wonderful Delphi runtime uses this undocumented resource, and doesn’t even check for error conditions. Borland has done some remarkable stuff, but there’s a reason I don’t miss using their products. This reminds me of the "leap year" bug in Borland’s C libraries, which caused all sorts of trouble circa 1992.

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