Blame Me: I Worked on the Windows Progress Dialog!

As one of the devs that worked on it at Microsoft, Dave explains how the Windows progress dialog works, why it's so often wrong, and why it's such a hard problem to solve in the first place!

PS: Measurements is spelled wrong, as is "acruate", which is almost funny. Almost.

[dino]

It is frustrating when it gets stuck at nearly completed and doesn't recalculate, but a real progress bar these days is a rarity and much better than the endless spinning circles.

[insidetrip]

Maybe I'm weird, but I've actually never found it odd that the estimated time bounced around. It always made sense to me that the estimated time is precisely what it says--an estimate. Given that it's using the current transfer speed, its probably mainly using that to estimate the time, so if I see the transfer speed go down, I should see the estimated time go up--which is exactly what we see. So I never really understood how people can complain about this sort of thing, its always seemed so obvious to me.

[gashnal]

Sir, we used to call it "microsoft time" and was a bit of dry humor when clients would ask how long things would take. "Its Microsoft time, it could take 10 minutes, 4 days, or 30 seconds." I am glad your doing these. It shines light on things i experianced learning technology as a kid and why things are they way they was.

[jobbld]

Dave: Presents dozens of cogent solid reasons why this is a hard problem to approach and an impossible one to solve based on experience and understanding. Describes many approaches and caveats to them all. Does so in a perfectly comprehensible simple manner.
Some comments: "Yeah, but if you add it up and divide then all good right?"
*sigh*

[kabochaVA]

Thew same goes with development estimates...
Project Manager: "How long will it take to develop an accurate Progress Dialog?"
Developer: "About 3 days... oh no, 4 weeks... or maybe 3 months... I mean, 2 weeks... no, 13 years... or 3 weeks... ok done"

[theftking]

I don't know what that fire thing is in the background, but it's awesome.

[JamesPotts]

It was brilliant when they added the graph of throughput. With this "explanation" for the estimate changes added, it's much easier to forgive the estimate. Instead of griping about the estimate, we gripe about the throughput. 😉

[punboleh]

I've seen the XKCD comic back then, and it's surreal to years later see the abstract person come to I always assumed there was a team of people working at, well, file explorer, not that the progress bar was actually done by one person as in the comic, and especially not that this person would start producing videos about their work at Microsoft. I can't wait to see more :)

[AshleyJColeman]

I'd love to hear a story about your most difficult to diagnose problem that you came across during your career. I'm sure every software developer has atleast one horror story about the bug that would never go away.

[clementeguillen]

I love that you share your experiences and anecdotes as a participant and witness to history. I was the designer of the COMDEX, Networld+Interop and CES conventions (trade show look and feel) and I feel like I have so many great stories and nobody to tell them to. The way you present your stories is fascinating and doesn't come across as vane at all. You are a great story teller Dave. Thank you for doing this.

[SirHackaLt.]

The one thing that always gets me is why do I need an estimate of how many files I’m deleting from a folder? I just want to delete the files, which the cmd prompt does. Windows Explorer on the other hand, wants to find out how many files and how large they are first which slows up the operation for large folders massively.

[mfx]

One trick I figured out a long time ago is that for lots of small files it can be significantly quicker to zip them all up, copy the zip file across and then unzip them on the destination drive than it is to copy them as individual files.

[timwhitman]

The more I hear Dave recount his tales at Microsoft, the more I realize that everything I do in my job as an IT tech over the last 20 years has been Bless or Cursed by his mighty hand... Thank you!

[ccricers]

This is how I found out it’s sometimes quicker to zip or Rar a folder and move that compressed file, instead of moving the folder. It’s not about reducing space, but about tracking and moving one big file faster than lots of little ones.

[nkronert]

Great explanation Dave. Next question I'd love to hear the answer to would be why Windows still can only mention that "this file has been locked by another process", not which bleeding process it is that holds the lock. The OS should know about these things, right? Oh and thanks Microsoft for finally having options in newer versions of Windows to retry or skip errors while copying huge trees of files. It used to be hair-pullingly frustrating to have an abort after hours of copying and having to figure out which files were still missing on the destination drive.

[imjustsomeguy]

I prefer seeing the transfer speed than the overall estimated time. Since Windows 8, I love how the Windows progress dialog shows a graph of the transfer speed in real time. Last year, I bought my first Mac and its progress dialog only shows the estimated time :/

[JaleTechAndGaming]

Dealing with the shell copying small files over the past 20 years has always been painful. Over networking, it seems to be much more painful. When possible and dealing with many small files over networks, I compress locally, copy, and then decompress at destination.

[WMDeception]

I have spent a measurable amount of my life staring at this progress bar. Now I feel even more connected to it.

[IanBPPK]

I'm feeling that LTT will reference this in the near future for some content.

[OmniscientWarrior]

This reminds me of the fury I feel when watching a Windows progress bar. "Almost done and... wtf is it doing back at one?!" I so hated how Microsoft put that in. They saw how so many people liked a progress bar letting them know how far along an installation was but then completely ignored that it was showing for the entire process and decided that they will use it for each singular part of the installation.

The only good that came from that, which would have happened in time, we got 2 progress bars, one for the totality and another for the parts (and that helps quite a bit when troubleshooting when something couldn't complete).