Archive for December 2007

Adding UI to make up for your UI

Sometimes applications don’t respond because, well, they’re busy. But only the most special of apps treat this not as a bug, but something to put up a “nothing to see here, move along” notification:

Microsoft Visual Studio is Busy

I mean, the sad part is I actually understand why they likely implemented this instead. At this point in Visual Studio’s lifecycle, it’s easier just to poll to check if the UI is unresponsive than to actually root out the cause of the unresponsiveness. It’s sad, actually. And the fun part is, in preparation for this blog article I didn’t even have to try very hard to get that little balloon to pop up. Took me about 30 seconds (and no I’m not going through the trouble of reporting it to Microsoft because it’s not entirely repeatable and I’m skeptical of what the results would be anyway). Go Visual Studio.