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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T22:31:32+00:00

I’m tasked with choosing a name that will in effect be the internal name

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I’m tasked with choosing a name that will in effect be the internal name of our architecture. I’m taking this responsibility seriously, as I have worked with a lot of “bad” namespaces and don’t want to inflict one on others.

What makes a “bad” namespace to me?

In terms of human factors:

  • An acronym that is essentially meaningless: DDL, MOS, etc
  • A namespace that collides with a common one from another vendor, like Office or Text or IO
  • A namespace that’s difficult to spell or pronounce for non-native English speakers because it’s either a foreign word or a proper noun: Vancouver

and so on.

I feel comfortable choosing a namespace in terms of descriptive ability and mnemonic. I’m wondering what the technical consequences of namespace names can be. For instance, what problems might arise from the namespace _, which is a legal C# namespace name? What about a single letter, like e? Are there namespaces that give CodeDom or Reflector fits? Do some namespaces that are legal in C# cause problems in other .Net languages? Is it possible to choose a namespace that is not Mono-compliant for some reason? Have you worked with a namespace that made your life difficult for reasons involving the compiler or Visual Studio or the Windows (or Linux) filesystem?

Thanks for reading and thanks in advance for any help!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    For non-technical stuff, read the Frameworks Design Guidelines. They have lots of good advice. Briefly:

    • Start with a company name.
    • choose stable (version-independent) names. FrobCorp.FrobozzleV2.Utilities is bad.
    • choose names that reflect the code purpose rather than the politics of the organization that produced it. FrobCorp.AdvancedResearchDivision.CambridgeOffice is bad; the AdvancedResearchDivision might be renamed tomorrow and the Cambridge office might be relocated.
    • use PascalCase unless that violates your branding. FrobCorp.jFrobozzle looks terrible, but FrobCorp.Jfrobozzle looks even worse.
    • use plurals when appropriate
    • and so on.

    There is a lot more good advice in the guidelines that I have not reproduced here. Go read them.

    However, it sounds like you’ve got the non-technical stuff down. One of the bits of advice in the guidelines is “do not name a type the same as its namespace”. That is good advice not just because doing so is confusing to readers; there is a good technical reason as well.

    For the technical reasons why naming a type the same as its namespace is a terrible idea, see my articles on the subject:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20120111133911/http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2010/03/09/do-not-name-a-class-the-same-as-its-namespace-part-one.aspx
    (At least as of January 2020, this is only available on archive.org.)

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