Microsoft GUIs

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 2:53 PM, Andrew Berg <bahamutzero8825 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Let Microsoft play with, and sell, pretty GUIs and pretty apps.
> I completely disagree. MS sucks at making GUIs.
>

I never said they were good at making GUIs. I said they were good at
selling GUIs.

Dan is right about the ugliness of the Windows APIs. There are
innumerable anomalies between otherwise-similar functions, weird
behaviours that may and may not have historical precedent, and enough
hair-pulling fuel to turn you bald in a week. Also, and possibly more
serious, the security features that Windows has mostly seem to have
been monkey-patched in; and there are ridiculous vulnerabilities just
waiting to be exploited. The WM_TIMER message can be sent by any
process to any process, and one of its parameters is the address of a
callback - and voila, other process starts executing code at that
address. And this works even if the program doesn't use timers.

ChrisA