The real-but-unofficial name is Another Fucking Driver. I see a lot of comments online of people saying they used to work at Microsoft or heard from a friend that works there explaining how it got this name, but I 100% remember watching a Microsoft Build conference (maybe ~10 years ago?) where the person who wrote it said on stage that he really did call it that, but they had to name it Auxiliary Function Driver for obvious reasons.
Sadly I can't find that talk anywhere on the internet, but it definitely happened.
mananaysiempre•6mo ago
> Sadly I can't find that talk anywhere on the internet
Microsoft is apparently incapable of preserving their website—in particular, several years ago they destroyed what used to be the centralized store for all of their videos, MSDN’s Channel 9. I find it useful to open an Internet Archive snapshot of channel9.msdn.com from before ~2020 and navigate from there.
(If I sound a bit salty, it’s because I found that a huge number of threads on the Microsoft support forums, mostly concerning older products, was “retired”—i.e. memory-holed—recently enough that Google still thinks they’re there. While the “support” part was always a joke, the threads were still occasionally better than a big fat nothing, which is what we have now.)
Wouldn’t be the “person who wrote it” unless he came back to do some special presentation. That guy left windows (and maybe even Microsoft) in the mid 90s. AFD has been around since the beginning of NT (edit at least 3.51, maybe even before that)
lloydatkinson•6mo ago
The guy who wrote it is literally some high up exec at Microsoft now, which is why he was presenting it, that's all I remember of him.
muststopmyths•6mo ago
hmm, you're right. You're probably talking about David Treadwell, who was at MSFT until 2016-ish. I was thinking of another member on the original Winsock team who left in the 90s.
nly•6mo ago
Windows APIs are truly hideous
dataflow•6mo ago
I really don't see what you mean. What do you find hideous here?
rfl890•6mo ago
The random Polish in the middle got me
LarMachinarum•6mo ago
fun fact (or not so fun): incidentally, AFD (or more precisely written AfD) is also the name of a radical far-right party in Germany. The party has progressively shifted to the fringe and is now classified as "confirmed right-wing extremist" by the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz), Germany's main domestic intelligence agency. Ref:
lloydatkinson•6mo ago
The real-but-unofficial name is Another Fucking Driver. I see a lot of comments online of people saying they used to work at Microsoft or heard from a friend that works there explaining how it got this name, but I 100% remember watching a Microsoft Build conference (maybe ~10 years ago?) where the person who wrote it said on stage that he really did call it that, but they had to name it Auxiliary Function Driver for obvious reasons.
Sadly I can't find that talk anywhere on the internet, but it definitely happened.
mananaysiempre•6mo ago
Microsoft is apparently incapable of preserving their website—in particular, several years ago they destroyed what used to be the centralized store for all of their videos, MSDN’s Channel 9. I find it useful to open an Internet Archive snapshot of channel9.msdn.com from before ~2020 and navigate from there.
(If I sound a bit salty, it’s because I found that a huge number of threads on the Microsoft support forums, mostly concerning older products, was “retired”—i.e. memory-holed—recently enough that Google still thinks they’re there. While the “support” part was always a joke, the threads were still occasionally better than a big fat nothing, which is what we have now.)
ZeroWidthJoiner•6mo ago
muststopmyths•6mo ago
lloydatkinson•6mo ago
muststopmyths•6mo ago