November 30th, 2005

Sometimes the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

An earlier name for Windows Server 2003 was Microsoft Windows .NET Server, and in the final weeks leading up the the product’s release, we received the following bug from a beta tester:

When I call the GetVersionEx function on build 3773, the OS name is still reported as “Microsoft Windows .NET Enterprise Server”. I have attached a sample program illustrating the bug.

I found this kind of confusing, because the GetVersionEx function doesn’t return a human-readable product name. Intriguged, I took a look at the sample program and it wasn’t too hard to see where the bug was. The program contained the lines 

if ( osvi.dwMajorVersion == 5 && osvi.dwMinorVersion == 2 )
   lstrcpyn(szOS, L”Microsoft Windows .NET”, MAX_PATH);

In other words, the program had the incorrect string hard-coded into it.

I reported my findings back to the person who submitted the bug, and the response was “Oops, sorry about that.”

Category
Old New Thing
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Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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