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.