It took Dan Cazzulino to bring to my attention Microsoft's latest strategy of naming new technologies so they sound like professional wrestling series...
Indigo and
Avalon are now but faint memories - long live WCF/WPF!
[Via Don Box's Spoutlet]
Now, I've said before that Indigo and Avalon sounded more like My Little Ponies, but I'd much rather stick to something memorable like that than deal with a maze of 'foundation' TLAs. You can bet we'll see MSXML rebranded as the Windows XML Foundation, ADO.NET as the Windows Data Foundation, and so on.
Microsoft goes through cycles with its acronyms. There was a time when it all began with M, for Microsoft: MDAC, MFC, MSMQ. Then OLE briefly reared its head and gave us OLEDB, before a wave of 'Active' technologies followed in the wake of ActiveX, giving us ATL, ASP, ADO and ADSI. Now the Windows Longh^H^H^H^H^HVista era technologies are apparently getting branded with the mark of 'W', for Windows.
The last time 'Windows' and 'Foundation' were in an acronym together it was in WFC - Microsoft's Windows Foundation Classes for J++, an 'embracing and extending' library which got them in no end of trouble. Let's hope this time the legal ramifications are less profound. As the Worldwide Fund For Nature found, wrestlers don't like sharing acronyms.
I suppose if Microsoft come out with a Windows Business-object Foundation, programmers can ditch the usual certification exams and instead compete head to head for the title 'WBF heavyweight champion of the world'...