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:
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.
> 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)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Office_for_the_Protect...
It's interesting to see which prominent figures of tech and politics in the USA have publicly associated with the AfD.
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.
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.)