Fixed-size dialog boxes
I know, I know, priorities, cost-benefit, concentrate on features, etc. But still.
It’s 2006. Eight years of development and four major versions released. Why does a 250-billion-dollar company’s flagship development product still squeeze large, frequently used, tabular user interfaces into non-resizable dialog boxes?
Tables with tens of thousands of rows, some of them containing astounding stretches of text such as TeamFoundationContextMenus.SourceControlPendingChangesSourceFiles.Compare.TfsContextPendingCheckins.CompareWithWorkspaceVersion (honestly!) — squished in a 374×49-pixel porthole quivering in its puniness in the center of my 1920×1200-pixel screen. Who perpetrates this kind of obscenity?
In that last one, how do we tell the four different ActiveDirectory exceptions apart? Well, we can mouse over them to get a tool tip. Or we can drag the eminently draggable-looking column separator line such that the checkbox columns disappear off the right edge.
I don’t doubt that this product got usability tests up the wazoo. Some triaging group meeting must have reviewed the (surely inevitable) suggestions of resizable dialog boxes, and concluded: “nah.”
Hey, maybe in late 2008.