I think based on my previous post, there is good evidence the problem is not in C2 code and is in Windows code. If the problem is in C2's code, then on a setup that is slow slow that it takes 30 minutes to open a project, how come it can open a dialog in 1 second? And how come it varies across Windows versions? It seems very likely it's bottlenecked on Windows.
Now, it seems Microsoft have done an update that regresses performance in some of the code used to start up this dialog. This puts us in a tough spot. I genuinely don't think it's fair to blame us for this. It sucks and users just want it to work, but I think it is unhelpful to pressure us to act over something that the evidence points to being in Windows. Are you just letting Microsoft off the hook here? Why be so combative and blame us for everything?
It is possible that we could refactor all our dialog code and try to find another way to do things that is faster. There are a number of problems with this:
- I can't reproduce the problem to the extent others report. So I don't know if the code I write will really help.
- Some of the related APIs in Windows, especially the icon ones, are incredibly old, crufty and inflexible. It was a pretty big headache just getting it to work like it does. I'd expect it to be very difficult and time consuming to change, and it really sucks that we would basically be wasting valuable time trying to compensate for what looks like Microsoft's mistake.
- There's no guarantee that a whole new approach would actually end up being faster. We'd still be using the Windows APIs, which the evidence points to being the problem.
- Imagine about a dozen other threads where users are being just as insistent as here that we must do X, Y or Z, and right now. Time is by far our most limited resource. We simply cannot do everything right away. I've pointed out already that the bug report FAQ says to allow several weeks just for a review. I've tried to make a special effort to look in to this more quickly given the attention around it. If you don't appreciate this and just keep blaming us for everything, it's hard to justify bumping it up the schedule over what others are asking for.
Unfortunately I don't think we have any good options here. I genuinely don't know what is the best thing to do about this.
At least Construct 3 isn't affected. For years many of our users insisted that native was better than HTML5 and the web would never be as good. How things have changed...