Comment by throwawayReply

I find there's almost no effort made for UI on the enterprise level of things. Which is understandable nowadays with powershell, but previously the GUI was usually the only way to get things done and seeing the old simpler interfaces was the norm. I guess this is what happens when you have engineers in charge and product managers not caring about the experience. This should lead to wonderful things, but in the MS world at least, it leads to old broken dialogs like pressing "open" to create a new file, not remembering previous folders and being thrust into c:\windows\system32 everytime, lack of handy quick access and shortcut buttons, and lots of F5 mashing because nothing refreshes itself for some reason.

Everytime I deal with MS enterprise products it just blows me over how anything of theirs actually works. There seems to be a strong empahsis to dogfood everything (okay to install this you need a .net version you don't have, a bunch of random libraries, some framework thing MS is kinda sorta pushing, a random KB or two, maybe silverlight, and then install process itself requires multiple reboots and usually troubleshooting). Then you have to install the application itself and its many hotfixes and service packs. This will definitely result in troubleshooting cryptic error codes as none of this stuff really works out of the box.

That said, while 10 and 2012 are perhaps uglier and less refined beasts, there does seem to be an emphasis on a single UI style with a real effort to hide the legacy stuff, as well as a much stronger emphasis on getting away from the GUI and just using powershell. No idea how that will ultimately pan out, but I do miss the old start menus. The 10 menu seems like it would be amazing, like you should be able to stretch it and fill it with tiles and shortcuts trivially. Instead it seems like something a little hostile to you and something MS uses to promote whatever it feels lime promoting at the time (xbox, bing, cortana, etc).

I don't think that "held out" is what happened with these dialogs. I think it's more like "don't fix what isn't broken" or "we forgot about that".

SSMS' backup dialog has to show the server filesystem, exposed over a TDS protocol. This means the implementers cannot use any off-the-shelf OS/Shell file selector dialog (comdlg) and had to design their own. Any 'advancement' in the OS/Shell dialogs would have to be 'matched', manually, in the SSMS code base. I'm not trying to defend the visual appearance of the said dialog, I'm just trying to give context why that particular file selection dialog has nothing to do with the OS/Shell file selection dialogs. Think at it more like a query result browsing dialog.

I consider the different dialogs in windows 10 a benefit of a well decoupled interface from the underlying application instead of frowning upon it.

Let's be real, they cannot change the whole interface in a single release so they are rolling things out partially, and good application design is what allows them to do so.

Maybe it's a bit inconsistent but it's the more pragmatic approach.

I believe there's a font selection dialog lib that is still present in every windows system folder since 3.1.