Pushing the limits 2 Oct 2007

Raymond Chen notes that if you have to ask where the operating system limits are, you're probably doing something wrong:

"If you're nesting windows more than 50 levels deep or nesting menus more than 25 levels deep or creating a dialog box with more than 65535 controls, or nesting tree-view items more than 255 levels deep, then your user interface design is in serious need of rethought, because you just created a usability nightmare.

"If you have to ask about the maximum number of threads a process can create or the maximum length of a command line or the maximum size of an environment block or the maximum amount of data you can store in the registry, then you probably have some rather serious design flaws in your program.

"I'm not saying that knowing the limits isn't useful, but in many cases, if you have to ask, you can't afford it. "

Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror sums up this attitude beautifully:

"If your design is skirting that close to an operating system edge condition, you're either doing something incredibly brilliant or incredibly stupid. Guess which one is more common?"