Java Coding Style – Benefits of Prefixing Function Parameter Names with p*

IMHO, this is a very bad idea. Reserved words are reserved for a reason, and doing this does decrease readability.

I also entirely agree with your second point. Naming a variable class, even if you could do it, would be just as bad as naming it tmp or a. What kind of class? A class of what? Names should be descriptive.

You raise some good points.

1. With regards to having duplicate classes, you can alias classes in C#. Use for example using ColorScheme = The.Fully.Qualified.Namespace.Outlook2007ColorScheme; See this post on StackOverflow. You've not indicated your programming language but I have inferred it from what you've written. So where you're dealing with two different projects, you can alias them as SmurfConfiguration and WartmongerConfiguration which would free ambiguity when consuming both classes.

2. As a service is exposed to external application(s) I see no problem in branding the service with your application name, so in this case SmurfService would be valid as it would actually disambiguate groups of services in the consuming application.

I feel that namespaces should be used to avoid this style of naming. It makes it more difficult to grok the code and see at face value what a class is without reading MyCompanyMyProductMyAreaClassName. Using the aliasing technique allows you to reduce ambiguity where needed. The only time I think you should introduce complexity into your naming is, as I've pointed out in #2, when people will be consuming a service. This is where it makes perfect sense to have this style of naming because if the consumer has a variety of services it is consuming the ambiguity could be confusing.