Windows 10 finally comes clean with its versioning

One of the quirks of the Windows operating system family lies with its naming conventions - both internally and externally. Yes, we had Windows 2000, then XP, then Vista, then Windows 7 and recently version 8 and subsequently 8.1. I am sure that most of those who read this blog knows that the actual (reported) version for each operating system has almost nothing to do with its name. 

For example, here are the OS versions that Windows reports back for each released version for the past 14 years;

Operating system     Version number

Windows 8.1                      6.3*
Windows Server 2012 R2      6.3*
Windows 8                        6.2
Windows Server 2012          6.2
Windows 7                        6.1
Windows Server 2008 R2      6.1
Windows Server 2008           6
Windows Vista                     6
Windows Server 2003 R2     5.2
Windows Server 2003          5.2
Windows XP 64-Bit Edition    5.2
Windows XP                      5.1
Windows 2000                   5

Noting that Windows NT (or NT 4) had a 4.x version number. And so, it looks like we have been doing version 6.x since the release of Windows Vista. There has been a number of reasons for this, most of which relate to application compatibility. One of the primary reasons for an application to fail, was that a poorly coded version check (generally to see if the OS was later than 2K) misread the version number and prevented an otherwise OK application from starting correctly.

In fact, we get into some truly weird scenarios with Windows 8.1 where the Windows API GetVersionEx has been modified to report the wrong version to developers. You can read more about this versioning behavior on MSDN here, but I have included an interesting quote here;

"In previous versions of Windows, calling the GetVersion(Ex) APIs would return the actual version of the operating system (OS), unless the process had been mitigated by an app compat shim to give it a different version. This was done on a provisional basis and was relatively incomplete in terms of the number of processes that Microsoft could reasonably shim in a release. Many applications fell through the cracks because they didn’t get shimmed due to poorly designed version checks."

Now it seems, and this is a rumor, but Microsoft may be aligning its reported OS versioning information with the operating system name in Windows 10. Here is a quick snap-shot of the latest build from Microsoft

Has Microsoft finally come clean about its reported version? When I get the latest version, I will run some code level tests - and, we will see.

Watch this space.