Why it's good to use [System] Hungarian notation

One of our components has a property called--for reason of obscurity say--URL. The code behind it is quite simple:

        public string URL {
            get {
                return mstrURL;
            }
            set {
                mstrURL = value;
            }
        }

This property is being edited through our Property Editor component via a sort of reflection mechanism.

Sometime ago, this component broke because the Property Editor was no longer able to "reflect" on the URL property.

A bit of googling turned up this MSKB article: "Type library identifiers are not case sensitive by design".

It turned out that somebody recently added this method in a completely different class, within the same assembly, but entirely unrelated to the component above:

   public void LoadUrl(string url) {
      ...
   }

So the code that gets called by RegAsm to generate the type library must have found the url parameter of the LoadUrl method first, and decided to reuse it as the moniker for our URL property.

I guess the moral of this story is: Stick with System Hungarian Notation.

   public void LoadUrl(string strUrl) {
      ...
   }

(Side Note: A good article on Hungarian Notation can be found at Joel On Software).