Choosing a name for a product or software component that can stand the test of time is often difficult and can often be a source of confusion for users of the software if the its usage outgrows that implied by its name. I have examples from both my personal life and my professional life.

RSS Bandit

When I chose this name I never considered that there might one day be another popular syndication format (i.e. ATOM) which I'd end up supporting. Given that Blogger, Movable Type, and LiveJournal are going to provide ATOM feeds and utilize the ATOM API for weblog editing/management then it is a foregone conclusion that RSS Bandit will support ATOM the specifications are in slightly less flux which should be in the next few months.

One that happens the name "RSS Bandit" will be an anachronism given that RSS will no longer be the only format supported by the application. In fact, the name may become a handicap in the future once ATOM becomes popular because there is the implicit assumption that I support the "old" and "outdated" syndication format not the "shiny" and  "new" syndication format.

XPathDocument

In version 1.0 of the .NET Framework we shipped three classes that acted as in-memory representations of an XML document

1. XmlDocument - an implementation of the W3C Document Object Model (DOM) with a few .NET specific extensions [whose functionality eventually made it into later revisions of the spec]
2. XmlDataDocument - a subclass of the XmlDocument which acts as an XML view of a DataSet
3. XPathDocument - a read-only in-memory representation of an XML document which conforms to the XPath data model as opposed to the DOM data model upon which the XmlDocument is based. This class primarily existed as  a more performant data source for performing XSLT transformations and XPath queries

Going forward, various limitations of all of the above classes meant that we came up with a fourth class which we planned to introduce in Whidbey. After an internal review we decided that it would be two confusing to add yet another in-memory representation of an XML document to the mix and decided to instead improve on the ones we had. The XmlDataDocument is really a DataSet specific class so it doesn't really fall into this discussion. We were left with the XmlDocument and the XPathDocument. Various aspects of the XmlDocument made it unpalatable for a number of the plans we had in mind such as acting as a strongly typed XML data source and moving away from a tree based DOM model for interacting with XML.

Instead we decided to go forward with the XPathDocument and add a bunch of functionality to it such as adding the ability to bind it to a store and retrieved strongly typed values via integrated support for W3C XML Schema datatyping, change tracking and the write data to it using the XmlWriter.

The primary feedback we've gotten about the new improved XPathDocument from usability studies and WinFX reviews is that there is little chance that anyone who hasn't read our documentation would realize that the XPathDocument is the preferred in-memory representation of an XML document for certain scenarios and not the XmlDocument. In v1.0 we could argue that the class was only of interest to people doing advanced stuff with XPath (or XSLT which is significantly about XPath) but now the name doesn't jibe with its purpose as much. The same goes for the primary mechanism for interacting with the XPathDocument (i.e. the XPathNavigator) which should be the preffered mechanism for representing and passing data as XML in the .NET Framework going forward.

If only I had a time machine and could go back and rename the classes XmlDocument2 and XmlNavigator. :(