I wake up every morning and thank God I am not working on or near Microsoft code. There is nothing about this code or anything about this story that is in any way sensible or pleasing. Take a simple, well-solved problem. Forgot all prior solutions. Solve it badly, with bad systems and bad ideas. Write the code in the ugliest, most opaque, most brittle and fragile manner imaginable. Now sit back and enjoy the satisfaction of getting to debug and resolve problems that never should have happened in the first place. The miracle is that Microsoft, built as it is to such a degree on this kind of trashy thinking and trashy source, still makes its annual billions. That right there is the power of incumbents.