The Surprisingly Permanent Windows Dialog: A Look at the Formatting Units Feature

Thanks to a Microsoft veteran, we learned a tidbit about Windows that shows just how permanent a temporary solution can be. David Plummer on X shared about the story dialog for formatting units. If you have been using operating systems from Microsoft for at least a few years, you may not have noticed that the dialog does not change.

It just takes the window header and font used in that version of Windows, otherwise it’s still the same. You call it from the context menu of the unit in the Explorer. Plummer recalls for the second half of 1994when on an apparently rainy Thursday morning he was writing the code for this dialogue.

Back then, part of the development team ported countless lines of user interface code from Windows 95 to Windows NT. But a different environment had to be developed for formatting needs, as the two systems were too different in this area. Plummer wrote down on paper the key choices a person could make when formatting.

The formatting dialog still looks the same. Almost 30 years now

Subsequently, he wrote the code in the Microsoft Visual C++ environment and, in the integrated tool, designed the layout of individual dialog elements vertically and in the order in which they need to be interacted with. At least roughly. The programmer reckoned that this was a temporary solution which later replaced by a more elegant setting. But we can find this temporary solution in Windows even after less than thirty years since its creation.

At the time, Plummer also caused storage formatted with the FAT file system to be no larger than 32 GB. This limit is also a product of one of his arbitrary decisions that day in 1994 when the developer was creating the formatting dialog. At Microsoft, he participated in the creation of various Windows components, including Task Manager, Calculator and Pinball.

Most of the elements in the Windows environment were well thought out, unlike the Format dialog, prevents the then Plummer development.

Resources: Dave W Plummer / X via Neowin

2024-04-05 11:57:43
#Format #dialog #created #temporary #solution #years #find #Windows