Names changed to protect… somebody.

I’m reviewing VB runtime functions as I work on my book and I noticed that the VbTypeName function has a very odd parameter name:

Public Function VbTypeName(ByVal UrtName As String) As String

Huh? What’s that “Urt” thing? That’s just one of the five hundred names that was attached to what eventually became the Common Language Runtime (or CLR for short). URT stood for “Universal RunTime.”

As I think I mentioned when I was talking about codenames recently, the one thing you can count on at Microsoft is that there will be absolutely no consistency or constancy to names over time. I have no idea why that is, but it just seems to be that way.

3 thoughts on “Names changed to protect… somebody.

  1. Eric Lippert

    I don’t know if you remember Trapper Robbins, who was a dev on the VBA team many years ago. He had a rule called "Trapper’s Rule", which, since his retirement, has become "Lippert’s Rule". Lippert’s rule is:

    "Program management is allowed to change the name of the product to anything they like at any time they want — ONCE."

    This week I will be going through my codebase and changing all the names of the DLLs so that they no longer contain our team code name. I don’t expect to have to do it again!

    Reply
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