After the painful experience of repeatedly changing names during the Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 development cycles, Microsoft decided to introduce a common, global branding API into Longhorn. The foundations of this system are present right from build 3683.
A new API was introduced in the kernel, called RtlGetOSProductName, which was then exposed to user space through GetOSProductName in kernel32.dll.
Dialogs like sysdm.cpl use this API to obtain branding information like the SKU and version. The argument of the function is a 7-bit long binary value. This value functions as a bit-mask, enabling/disabling certain parts of the branding information.
- Company: Microsoft
- Family (Generic): Windows
- Family (Specific): Longhorn XP
- Type: Professional
- Version: Version 2003
- Service Pack: (Blank by default in all Longhorn builds)
- Copyright: Copyright © 1981-2003 Microsoft Corporation
The binary value 1111111 (127 in decimal, or 0x7F in hexadecimal) will yield the complete branding string of all the above info concatenated.
The application below uses P/Invoke to call the new function with decimals as argument. For demonstration purposes, the service pack version has been set to 1 in the registry for the screenshot below.
An application demostrating the different branding parts returned by the API
The source code for this application is available on GitLab.
The default screensaver in Longhorn build 3683, logon.scr, has been altered to take advantage of the branding API and uses one of its functions to load the appropriate branding bitmap.
In later builds, Microsoft would introduce pig latin into the branding API so that parts of the interface not using the Branding API could be tracked down and updated.