"If you think about it it's the only sensible way to do it for a multi-user environment."
Well that's all well and good for storing stuff like user control perferences in Half Life 2, (which it actually stores in INI files in the program directory, OOPS) but what about things like high score tables, which you'd want all members of a household to be on?
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Ah, I see, there's an All Users under Documents and Settings. So you'd put it in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data.
Hm...
I've just always resisted putting things in Documents and Settings. If everyone put their app stuff in there it would be hard to find the data for a particular app, because every idiot company puts the data under Company Name/Application Name instead of putting it under Application Type/Application Name. If I want to find my FTP program's directory, I look in Program Files/Internet/App Name, because that is where I have put it. But if I have a spyware program for example under "Tenebril/Spycatcher" I'm not gonna be able to find that because hell if I know that the company that makes Spycatcher is named Tenebril.
If Microsoft wants to do that, then they need to standardize the directories stuff goes in, just like they have created "file types" to make it easier to find files of a particular type.
Well that's all well and good for storing stuff like user control perferences in Half Life 2, (which it actually stores in INI files in the program directory, OOPS) but what about things like high score tables, which you'd want all members of a household to be on?
...
Ah, I see, there's an All Users under Documents and Settings. So you'd put it in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data.
Hm...
I've just always resisted putting things in Documents and Settings. If everyone put their app stuff in there it would be hard to find the data for a particular app, because every idiot company puts the data under Company Name/Application Name instead of putting it under Application Type/Application Name. If I want to find my FTP program's directory, I look in Program Files/Internet/App Name, because that is where I have put it. But if I have a spyware program for example under "Tenebril/Spycatcher" I'm not gonna be able to find that because hell if I know that the company that makes Spycatcher is named Tenebril.
If Microsoft wants to do that, then they need to standardize the directories stuff goes in, just like they have created "file types" to make it easier to find files of a particular type.