Fun story today about that time I tried to make my company's program comply with the Vista requirements. Spoiler alert: it's literally not possible to comply with Vista requirements.
At the time I worked for WildTangent, a leading provider of games and a nifty game-catalog program that many companies pre-installed on their computers. We also did 3D on the web before realizing that the market for 3D on the web was very limited :-(
Vista had the noble and sensible goal of getting companies to stop using weird, undocumented hacks (read The Old New Thing for many, many blog posts by Raymond Chen about compatibility). Enter a Vista requirement: "Everything must follow the written standards".
Vista also wanted to be big, fresh and exiting. And in Vista, that meant "large icons". Windows programs were accustomed to making tiny little 8x8 and 16x16 icons. These were appropriate for the tiny screens of the time, but in the Vista timeframe more and more people were getting big monitors. Enter our second requirement, "all Vista programs must include a 256x256 icon".
And the last bit of knowledge: the officially documented Icon spec in Windows is clear about two things: the icon's size must be included and fit into a 1-byte field, and that there is a limited number of valid icon sizes.
Both of these are problems. A value of 256 (for a 256x256 icon size) is to large to fit into a 1-byte field. In practice, Windows code just decides that a value of zero means 256, but at the time it was completely undocumented. The icon size of 256x256 not being on the official list of acceptable icon sizes was just the icing on the cake, as it were.
The Microsoft response? They didn't care.
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