One of my readers brought up in the chatroom that he’s faced with an undocumented bug. He’s using the Italian version of Windows Vista, and said that when he uses the command prompt to copy files, and it prompts you ‘Yes|No|All’ on whether or not to copy the file, the command doesn’t properly respond to your input. If he says ‘No’, the command copies the file anyway! I checked Microsoft’s Knowledge Base, and did find one article that perfectly describes the issue, but the article isn’t for Vista, it is for Windows Server 2003.

How can a Windows 2003 bug exist in Vista? As Paul Thurrott explains:

Future Windows versions are always be based on the most up-to-date Windows version at the time, and at the time that Microsoft reset Longhorn development and began work on what we now know as Windows Vista, that version was Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 (SP1). When Windows Vista development originally started in 2001, however, it was then based on Windows XP. In mid-2004, Microsoft had to restart the core development of Windows Vista because it was too hard to go back and componentize the existing Windows Vista core code. So when it restarted Windows Vista development, Microsoft naturally used the Windows Server 2003 with SP1 code base instead of that of XP.

Getting back to my readers problem, you can see from the image below, he’s using Vista, and clearly choosing not to copy the files, yet Vista is copying them anyway:

Based on the KB-article, we know that this is happening because the contents of the Ws03res.dll resource file are not correctly localized in the Italian version of Windows Server 2003, err, I mean Windows Vista.

The bigger issue in my mind, though, is that Microsoft knows that this is an issue in Windows Server 2003, and they know Vista (and Server 2008 for that matter) are based on the Server 2003 code, yet the article doesn’t address Vista, and no other Vista specific article exists to inform Vista users of this issue. We know someone spent time thinking about the issue, since this one has a hotfix available (for Server 2003 SP1 only). Is this a case of compartmentalization, where one group borrows code from another, and then they never talk again? Doesn’t this work against the benefits of sharing a code base? Granted this is just one small issue, but it has to make you wonder how many other issues have been identified in Server 2003, which has been out for some time now, but not addressed in Vista? If nothing else, this suggests that when you have a problem in Vista, and you go to search the Knowledge Base, try searching for your problem under Windows Server 2003 as well.