Le'ts say, you want to inform your user about what's going on (which is a nice thing to do).

This is an example of how not to do it:

What exactly is that "RemoveTempHxDs", the installer is doing right there? And why is the progress bar at 100% for more than three minutes when I made the screenshot?

If you are unable to provide meaningful progress information, don't provide it at all. Make your program display a "neutral" progress bar (some spinning wheel or something like that) and make it tell the user it's "Doing stuff...". Why expose useless internals?

While I see some value in displaying information like that if it's to have more information when you are trying to support the application. But in that case, a log file of some kind is much more valuable as it both gives YOU as developer the information you need and does not confuse your user.



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