GetVersionInfoEx() deliberately broken in Windows 8.1/10

There should be a Developer Advocate position within Microsoft. They seriously need someone who doesn’t “Drink the Kool-Aid” who can step in and tell the Program Managers or Marketing bods or whoever it is who makes all the really STUPID decisions that the decision is stupid and that they should get back in their box and leave the developers who support the Windows ecosystem by building software that runs on it to just get on with their lives…

Yes, this is going to be a rant…

So someone has decided that being able to query which version of the Operating System that your program is running on is a bad thing. If you try and call GetWindowsVersionEx() on Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 and you haven’t specifically set your application’s manifest to say that it’s compatible with Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 then GetWindowsVersionEx() will lie to you and tell you that you’re running on Windows 8. Excuse me, but that’s just brain dead. There’s NO valid reason for doing this because you can’t know WHY the caller needs this information.

OK, so it might be better, in some circumstances, to be checking for the presence of various function entry points in various dlls and dynamically working out that what you need is present BUT that’s not the only reason that you might want to know what OS you’re running on and it’s not even the only GOOD reason.

My current situation is that Windows 10 spawns a conhost.exe process whenever you start a console process. The test code that I have for my Win32 Job API wrapper includes some checks to determine that the correct job accounting data is being returned from some test programs that it spawns. This accounting data is different under Windows 10 as there are more processes running within the job. Ideally I’d like to acknowledge that this is an OS difference, adjust the test to know that when it runs on this OS it needs to expect slightly different results and then move on with my life. Of course, as Microsoft has deliberately chosen to break the API that would let me cleanly work out what version I’m running on I have to spend time writing ranty blog postings and crufting up crappy work arounds.