Microsoft Codenames

If you are interested in Microsoft Technologies and keep track of Microsoft products and technologies you would have already noticed that Microsoft has a unique codename for every project. Microsoft products start life as a project codename. Exactly how these codenames are decided remains a mystery, and indeed some suggest that there is meaning to be found hidden in their selection. Such a theory is encouraged by the eagerness with which Microsoft representatives suggest that we should not attach too much significance to codenames, even implying the names are selected almost at random.

I am personally a fan of Microsoft codenames. The problem is that, with the amount projects Microsoft is working on, it’s really hard for us to keep track of all the codenames. Below you will find a list of product codenames and their derivations:

Codename	Product	Derivation
DEVELOPMENT TOOLS
Thunder	Visual Basic
Boston	Visual Studio 97
Blackbird	Internet Studio, a development environment for MSN which eventually became Visual InterDev.
Aspen	Visual Studio 98 (6.0)	Ski resort in Colorado.
Jakarta	Visual J++ 6.0	Capital of Indonesia, located on the island of Java.
Cool	C#	Short for ‘C-based Object-Oriented Language’.
Rainier	Visual Studio .NET	Mount Rainier is a dormant volcano south of Seattle.
Everett	Visual Studio .NET 2003	Town north of Seattle.
Whidbey	Visual Studio .NET 2005	Island north of Seattle.
Whitehorse	Design tools supplied with Visual Studio .NET 2005	Capital of Yukon Territory in Canada which became famous during the Klondike Gold Rush.
Burton	Visual Studio 2005 Team System	Unknown, although it is the name of a North American manufacturer of snowboards.
Orcas	Successor to VS.NET 2005 for developing ‘Longhorn’ applications	Island north of Whidbey.
Hawaii	Successor to ‘Orcas’	An island ‘much further out’ than Orcas or Whidbey. Also, where the development team plan to celebrate its completion.
OPERATING SYSTEMS
Janus	Windows 3.1
Sparta	Windows for Workgroups 3.1
Snowball	Windows for Workgroups 3.11
Daytona	Windows NT 3.5
Cairo	Collected technologies that may eventually come to fruition in Longhorn.	Capital of Egypt on the river Nile.
Impala	Windows NT4 Embedded
Chicago	Windows 95	The windy city.
Nashville	Internet Explorer 4 Desktop Update for Windows 95	The home of country music, in Tennessee.
Memphis	Windows 98	City in Tennessee.
Whistler	Windows XP	Mountain in Canadian ski resort around four hours drive north of Seattle. (The ‘XP’ stands for eXPerience.)
Lonestar	Tablet PC 2004
Longhorn	Successor to Windows XP	The Longhorn Saloon & Grill is situated between the Whistler and Blackcomb mountains.
Indigo	Communication services in ‘Longhorn’
Avalon	Display services used by ‘Longhorn’
Blackcomb	Forthcoming server-side version of Longhorn	Another mountain in the Whistler-Blackcomb ski resort.
BACKEND SERVERS
Sphinx	SQL Server 7.0	Mythical creature famous for asking riddles.
Plato	SQL Server 7.0 OLAP Services	One of the greatest analytical thinkers in ancient Greece and pupil to Socrates.
Shiloh	SQL Server 2000	Location of major Civil War battle in Tennessee.
Liberty	SQL Server 2000 64-bit
Aurum	SQL Server 2000 data mining features	Latin word for gold.
Yukon	SQL Server 2005	Yukon Territory in Canada, capital city Whitehorse.
Osmium	Exchange Server 5.5	One of the Platinum group of elements and the most dense metal known. Atomic number 77 in the Periodic table.
Platinum	Exchange 2002	Silvery-white metal often used in jewellery. Atomic number 78 in the Periodic table.
Titanium	Exchange 2003	As strong as steel but half the weight. Atomic Number 22 in the Periodic table.
Kodiak	Abandoned successor to Exchange 2003 that was supposed to use the SQL Server 2005 database engine.	Island in the Gulf of Alaska.
Falcon	Message Queue Server (MSMQ)
Viper	Transaction Server 2.0
Tahoe	SharePoint Server 2001	A lake resort between California and Nevada.
Hydra	Windows NT Terminal Services	Multi-headed dragon-like creature from Greek mythology.
Babylon	Host Integration Server 2000
Cedar	COM Transaction Integrator for CICS and IMS (COMTI)
Wolfpack	Cluster Server
Vienna	Office Live Communication Server 2005	Capital of Austria.
Hermes	System Management Server
MOBILE PLATFORMS
Pegasus	Windows CE 1.0
Cedar	Windows CE 3.0
Merlin	Pocket PC 2002
Stinger	Smartphone 2002
Starlite	.NET Compact Framework 1.0
Talisker	Windows CE .NET	The only whisky distillery on the Isle of Skye.
MISCELLANEOUS
Cirrus	Access 1.0
Athena	Outlook Express
Hailstorm	.NET My Services
Nile	OLE DB	River in Africa
Kajera	OLE DB provider for ODBC	River that, like the Nile, flows from Lake Victoria.
Trident	Dynamic HTML
Denali	Active Server Pages	Denali National Park in Alaska contains North America’s highest mountain.
Springboard	Microsoft’s security project which will result in Office 2003 SP1, Windows XP SP1 and Windows Server 2003 SP1
Palladium	A forthcoming secure run-time environment called Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB)	Silvery-white metal in the Platinum group. Atomic Number 46 in the Periodic Table.
Xenon	Successor to the Xbo

 

Note:

The above list was obtained from: http://www.dnjonline.com/articles/backend/codenames.asp.

(This list was last updated in May 2005)

Additional References:

• http://www.msbetas.org/?page=codenames
• http://bink.nu/Codenames.bink
• http://www.coolfacts.co.uk/site/id.htm