The Old New Thing

A product name more than 63 characters? Are they including the entire company mission statement or something? Eeesh.

Do you say "approximately 259" because you're not sure, or because it varies based on something?

>> A product name more than 63 characters? Are they including the entire company mission statement or something? Eeesh.

microsoft windows server 2003 small business server service pack 2

66 characters.

But we know, 640K.. err! 63 characters is enough for everyone.

I kind of wish that this was still enforced, actually.

I get tired of seeing programs that display as "Broderbund Presents a Maxis Program by Berkeley Systems: Kid Pix 2008." This goes double for programs that use the same text in the folder they create as part of the Start Menu registration, causing that lovely effect where your Programs menu becomes the width of a widescreen monitor.

Obviously this isn't Microsoft's fault, so I guess I'm just ranting.

The longest entry under "Add/Remove Programs" on my computer (XP Pro SP2) is "Security Update for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Software Developers - ENU (KB937061)" at 102 characters.  Do I win a prize?

I'm also unsure about the 259 limit.  From my understanding, MAX_PATH is 260 to account for drive specification (i.e. "C:\\") and a path of 256 characters (including a NULL terminator).  256 would make more sense than 260 (why would you worry about drive specification in product name?), but I guess everybody uses MAX_PATH size buffers for everything so why not use it for this as well.

>>>microsoft windows server 2003 small business server service pack 2

>>>66 characters.

That sounds pretty close to a "mission statement" to me... Do you really need the "Small Business"? It's not like you're going to have Small Business and Corporate installed at the same time. Do you really need to say "Service Pack 2" when you could say "SP2"? This is almost like one of those developer "taxes" that needs to be paid--stop with the ultra-long names. I don't want to have to read all of that, and when a user sees such a long name they'll briefly be confused (see that book which says you can only hold 5 things in your head at once).

>>>But we know, 640K.. err! 63 characters is enough for everyone

The line has to be drawn somewhere. Personally I prefer the line to be drawn just before where the storage can't hold it, like 255 so you can store the length in a byte, or 65535 so you can store it in an 4-byte int (which is why CIL allows for for way too many arguments--when are you going to have more than 255 arguments being passed into a function? If I'm a developer on your SDK and I need to pass 1000 arguments to your function, I'll be "a little bit annoyed".)

Why 259? That's a weird number. Are you sure the 9 is the right way up :-)

Bigger, ehh longer isnt always better - a product name should IMHO be able to fit 63-characters, my advice would if you get this warning: Try to make the name shorter!

ie. "Microsoft Windows Server 2003 SMB - SP2" is just fine...

This whole topic remind of another post:

"The most important choice in writing is not what you say, it's what you don't say"

I think John should get a prize.

My longest (on Vista) string scraped in at the old-style 63 characters from a company who's legal team are necessarily heavy influencers the design procese:

Microsoft Save as PDF Add-in for 2007 Microsoft Office programs

How about:

Intel(R) Integrated Performance Primitives 5.2 for Windows* on IA-32 Intel(R) Architecture

Btw, Raymond, is it 259 bytes or 259 (unicode) characters? :)

Just guessing, but IIRC MAX_PATH is 260, WCHAR programNameBuf[MAX_PATH] would give you 259 characters plus a \0 terminator - hence the old limit being 63, i.e. WCHAR programNameBuf[64]

is it 63/259 characters or bytes or name/sizeof(UTF-16 char)==63/259?

I'm trying to think of the Korean children.

I think MAX_PATH is 260 so you can have

C:\<256 chars><NUL>

Mind you 260 is multiple of 13, and there are 13 UC2-2 chars in a long filename in VFAT. So if you can do 256 you can also do 260. Maybe it dates back to Windows 98.

Ooh, I know!

260 was considered a very lucky number by the long lived and peaceful Yn'Gon*Que aliens. They formed a short lived colony on Earth back in Jurassic Period (at spacetime coordinates 260,260,260,260,260) but they ran out of food, fought a terrible civil war, got hit by an asteroid shower and then decimated by a plague from Earth based bacteria.

They were eventually wiped out when the endless waves of giant carnivorous (and almost completely blaster proof) dinosaurs that had attacked their compound day and night since they arrived finally overwhelmed and ate their few living defenders.

Ooh, I know!

260 was considered a very lucky number by the long lived and peaceful Yn'Gon*Que aliens. They formed a short lived colony on Earth back in Jurassic Period (at spacetime coordinates 260,260,260,260,260) but they ran out of food, fought a terrible civil war, got hit by an asteroid shower and then decimated by a plague from Earth based bacteria.

They were eventually wiped out when the endless waves of giant carnivorous (and almost completely blaster proof) dinosaurs that had attacked their compound day and night since they arrived finally overwhelmed and ate their few living defenders.

@Anon :) but don't post it another 258 times :P

"Microsoft RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer for Windows XP Version 1.0 (Build 50)" is the longest I got.

It's installed in "C:\Program Files\Pro Imaging Powertoys\Microsoft RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer for Windows XP".

How about only putting the program name in the "program name".

eg: The program name is just "Word", Microsoft is the publisher, Office is the suite of programs and 2003 is the version. They are all important pieces of information, but they are NOT part of the program name. The program's window title and icon should read just "Word" - the user has no need for the other stuff.