I see book authors, editors, bloggers, press, team members, and occasionally even a VP misspell our products, technologies, and features that I thought I would build and maintain a list of the correct capitalization and spelling of the most commonly misspelled Microsoft products and technologies.
Sources: Internal site (brandtools) and the Microsoft Trademarks Web site.
Last updated: April 27, 2010
Incorrect | **Correct ** |
| .net or .Net | .NET |
| .Net framework 4.0, .NET framework 4.0 | .NET Framework |
| AdCenter, Ad Center, Adcenter | adCenter |
| Ado.net, ADO.Net | ADO.NET |
| Asp.net, ASP.Net | ASP.NET |
| Asp.Net ajax, Asp.NET Ajax | ASP.NET AJAX |
| Asp.Net Mvc | ASP.NET MVC |
| Biz Spark, Bizspark | BizSpark |
| Clear Type, Clear type, Cleartype | ClearType |
| Directaccess, Direct Access | DirectAccess |
| Direct Show, Directshow | DirectShow |
| Direct X | DirectX |
| Dream Spark, Dreamspark | DreamSpark |
| Home Group, Home group | HomeGroup |
| HotMail, Hot Mail | Hotmail |
| Info Path, Infopath | InfoPath |
| intellisense, Intellisense | IntelliSense |
| Iron Ruby | IronRuby |
| Kin | KIN |
| Linq | LINQ |
| MSN Messenger | Windows Live Messenger |
| One Note, Onenote | OneNote |
| Open type, Opentype | OpenType |
| PlayTo, Play to | Play To |
| Power Point, Powerpoint | PowerPoint |
| Powershell, Power Shell | PowerShell |
| Sea Dragon, Seadragon | SeaDragon |
| Sharepoint, Share Point | SharePoint |
| Silver Light, SilverLight | Silverlight |
| Skydrive, Sky Drive | SkyDrive |
| Sql Server | SQL Server |
| Visual Basic .net (the “.net” was removed in the 2005 version) | Visual Basic |
| Visual C# Express 2010 or Visual Basic Express 2010 or Visual C++ Express 2010 | Visual _version _2010 Express as in Visual C# 2010 Express, Visual Basic 2010 Express |
| Visual Studio 2010 Team Foundation Server | Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 |
| Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 or Visual Studio Professional 2010 | Visual Studio 2010 _version, _as in Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Visual Studio 2010 Professional |
| WebSite Spark, Website spark | Website Spark |
| Win 32 | Win32 |
| Windows Mobile (except when referring to previous versions like 5.0 or 6), Windows phone 7 Series | Windows Phone |
| Xaml | XAML |
| XBOX, xbox | Xbox |
| Xbox Live, XBOX Live | Xbox LIVE |
Caveats
These guidelines don’t apply to URLs (ex: www.asp.net) or to code –namespaces, variables, and classes should follow the .NET Framework naming guidelines.
This list only covers capitalization/spacing rules, it doesn’t cover the correct usage of (tm) or ® symbols or the correct word usage rules. For those, refer to the trademark Web site.
Also note that I have no idea why we are so inconsistent say on keeping features/brands two words versus one word or the order of product/version/year.