Re: He's right. Again.
Microsoft's problem is that - historically - they've CREATED undocumented internal API's that only they can use which provide things that people want and can't get any other way.
From DR DOS to Windows 3.1, Office to Exchange, they have relied on only THEMSELVES knowing when it's safe to call an internal API that gives them a speed boost or a capability that otherwise wouldn't exist.
They don't document them, but their own software uses it, and uses it to get a performance boost.
Thus when others do use them, and use them slightly unusually, and Microsoft update they break their own software and other people's too.
They're still doing such things, and still have a legacy of everything from undocumented API calls to hidden registry entries, all of them undocumented, necessary to achieve certain things not documented, and all of them needing to be carried forward to future OS and backwards compatibility layers (16-bit, 32-bit, 64-bit so for, not to count platform ports, etc.).
Microsoft cause the mess 9 times out of 10. That people then use it is not surprising if there's no other way of doing things.
Brought to you by the company that STILL does not offer a programmatic, or group-policy, method of changing a user's account picture that doesn't involve creating dozens of PNG files in different sizes and overwriting ones with special names inside local user folders that don't propagate back to the network. Yet though they have exactly that functionality in AD (jpegPhoto pulls down automatically) to fulfill their need in Exchange, it doesn't translate to Windows 8 and above account images that appear on their own login screens (which need a local, resized, specifically-named PNG/JPG put into a special location only created on the local hard disk after a user has logged in).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
