Reading Geoff's post about the VS launch got me thinking when he made the following statement:

I'm sick of clunky-to-say product names. While I thought WCF and WWF were bad (and are :) VS, SQL and Biztalk are also bad.  The 98 in Windows 98 is easy to say. So's the 2000 in Windows 2000. 2002, 2003, 2005 - none of these roll off the tongue anywhere nearly so easily. After spending the day where the most common sentence included the phrase '...Visual Studio 2005, SQL Server 2005 and Biztalk Server 2006...', damn I'm sick of both hearing and saying these lines - all those 2005s get very clunky when wrapping your mouth around them. From now on, I'm going to refer to each one as VS8, SQL9 and Biztalk3 (I think it's three...). If you don't know your version numbers, look them up! Actually, I'm still quite partial to the code names. You'll still likely still hear me say Whidbey and Yukon too.

I never really thought about it before, but I do tend to shortcut some of those names when I'm talking with people as well.  Windows 98 became 98, Windows 2000 became 2000, Windows XP is just XP, Visual Studio .NET simply became .NET until 2003 came out then I had to start distinguising between them by using 1.0 and 1.1 respectively.  Now with 2005 out, it's become 2.0.  I do still use the code names quite often as well, I called Windows 95, Chicago for quite some time.  Luckily, most of the people I talk with understand and use similar if not the same shortcuts. But I realize now that I should be careful when talking with others.

Be interesting to hear how others shortcut the names.