Breaking backwards compatibility: a 5 year old bug deep within Windows
Microsoft has a great track record of maintaining support for legacy software running under Windows. There is an entire compatibility layer baked into the OS that is dedicated to fixing issues with decades old software running on modern iterations of Windows. To learn more about this application compatibility infrastructure, I'd recommend swinging over to Alex Ionescu's blog . He has a great set of posts describing the technical details on how user (even kernel ) mode shimming is implemented. With all of that said, it's an understatement to say that Microsoft takes backwards compatibility seriously. Occasionally, the humans at Microsoft make mistakes. Usually, though, they're very quick to address these problems. This blog post will go over an unnoticed bug that was introduced in Windows 8 with a documented Win32 API. At the time of this post, this bug is still present in Windows 10 (Creator's Update) and has been around for over 5 years. Forgotten Win32 AP