A Programmer's Dream

The About Box

Posted by Stephen Wrighton on 31 Jan 2007

I found a Code Project article describing an about box which the author rolled out as a .NET winforms control. He offers both .NET 1.1 and 2.0 versions of this control. What I found interesting is that his goal was to create a simple set of 'dogtags' for an application, rather than anything fancy.

Which is a fine and noble goal for .NET 1.1, but .NET 2.0 already has a simple About Us form control as a standard part of it's templates.

Sure, his does extra things like display the version for each of the DLL's in the application, but frankly, those are better served in a configuration file somewhere, and only used during updates. Or even if there's an error, THEN display that type of information to the user (as a bug report to be sent to the developer). Ultimately, users don't need to know all the information which the author provides in his about box, and while I find it neat and interesting, I can't see where it would be useful from a user experience or user accessibility point of view for a standard user.

A standard user, just doesn't care that much about it.

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