{"id":16943,"date":"2009-08-28T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-08-28T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2009\/08\/28\/the-great-thing-about-naming-conventions-is-that-not-everybody-will-follow-them\/"},"modified":"2009-08-28T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-08-28T10:00:00","slug":"the-great-thing-about-naming-conventions-is-that-not-everybody-will-follow-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20090828-00\/?p=16943","title":{"rendered":"The great thing about naming conventions is that not everybody will follow them"},"content":{"rendered":"

The naming convention for HRESULT<\/code> is «facility»_<\/code>«severity»_<\/code>«name», where the facility portion (and the underscore) is omitted if the facility is FACILITY_NULL<\/code> or FACILITY_WIN32<\/code>.\n Good luck finding anybody who follows this naming convention.\n Okay, fine, if you look closely you might be able to find some people who do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
COM  <\/th>\nCO_<\/td>\nE_<\/td>\nNOTINITIALIZED<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
CO_<\/td>\nS_<\/td>\nMACHINENAMENOTFOUND<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Structured storage  <\/th>\nSTG_<\/td>\nE_<\/td>\nSHAREVIOLATION<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
STG_<\/td>\nS_<\/td>\nCONVERTED<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
SETUPAPI  <\/th>\nSPAPI_<\/td>\nE_<\/td>\nEXPECTED_SECTION_NAME<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Data and view  <\/th>\nDV_<\/td>\nE_<\/td>\nTYMED<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
DV_<\/td>\nE_<\/td>\nFORMATETC<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Class factory  <\/th>\nCLASS_<\/td>\nE_<\/td>\nNOAGGREGATION<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Class registry  <\/th>\nREGDB_<\/td>\nE_<\/td>\nCLASSNOTREG<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
OLEDB  <\/th>\nDB_<\/td>\nE_<\/td>\nDELETEDROW<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

Actually, I guess I was a bit too pessimistic when I said nobody<\/i> follows it. It seems that the majority of Windows components do follow this convention, although there are some notable exceptions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
DirectDraw  <\/th>\nDDERR_UNSUPPORTEDFORMAT<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
ADSI  <\/th>\nE_ADS_INVALID_DOMAIN_OBJECT<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

There are also some people who decided to confuse matters further by using the HRESULT<\/code> convention for error codes returned by GetLastError()<\/code>!<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
RPC  <\/th>\nRPC_S_OBJECT_NOT_FOUND<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
SmartCard  <\/th>\nSEC_E_SMARTCARD_CERT_REVOKED<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Task scheduler  <\/th>\nSCHED_E_SERVICE_NOT_LOCALSYSTEM<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Winsock  <\/th>\nWSA_E_NO_MORE<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

I apologize for the confusion this has caused.<\/p>\n

Pre-emptive clarifying remark<\/b>: The examples given in this article are merely illustrative and are not intended to be comprehensive<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The naming convention for HRESULT is «facility»_«severity»_«name», where the facility portion (and the underscore) is omitted if the facility is FACILITY_NULL or FACILITY_WIN32. Good luck finding anybody who follows this naming convention. Okay, fine, if you look closely you might be able to find some people who do. COM   CO_ E_ NOTINITIALIZED CO_ S_ MACHINENAMENOTFOUND […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-16943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-code"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

The naming convention for HRESULT is «facility»_«severity»_«name», where the facility portion (and the underscore) is omitted if the facility is FACILITY_NULL or FACILITY_WIN32. Good luck finding anybody who follows this naming convention. Okay, fine, if you look closely you might be able to find some people who do. COM   CO_ E_ NOTINITIALIZED CO_ S_ MACHINENAMENOTFOUND […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16943\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}