A campaign to persuade Microsoft to reverse the name change for its former WinFX technologies kicked into high gear again on Friday, with the leader of the effort sending an e-mail to company officials as a follow-up to a recent petition. WinFX is now known as .Net Framework 3.0.The email, addressed to the “decision makers of the .Net Platform,” rejects the notion that the name change was made by popular demand. The correspondence was sent to executives such as Jason Zander, Microsoft general manager for the .Net Framework, and S. “Soma” Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft. “What we have found is that despite the statement that we as customers asked for this change, in reality, such a request does not come close to representing the demand of your customers. In fact, it goes against our wishes as it complicates the way we do business with our customers,” said Rei Miyasaka, a freelance developer and consultant who wrote the e-mail on Friday. On August 9, he authored an online petition against the name change, which has gathered 839 signatures as of about 4 p.m. PST on Friday.In Friday’s e-mail, Miyasaka cites comments from persons signing the petition. “WinFX is a Windows SDK component, not a .Net component, and its naming must be corrected to clarify this,” one signer wrote.“WinFX is the successor to Win32, not to .Net 2.0,” said another. The letter suggests several solutions, including packaging .Net 2.0 and WinFX together as .Net 2.1, renaming to Net 2.5 and reverting to WinFX.“By not incrementing the major version number, you can restore proper order without jamming .Net’s semantics for every coming version, and avoid rendering the perception that .Net 2.0 is already obsolete,” the letter says in justifying the .Net 2.1 naming suggestion.Microsoft, looking to clarify its naming convention for its developer framework, renamed WinFX to Net Framework 3.0 this spring. Net Framework 3.0 is slated to be part of the Windows Vista platform. .Net Framework 3.0 includes the Windows Communication Foundation Web services platform, the Windows Presentation Foundation presentation layer, Windows Workflow, and Windows CardSpace for identity management. Responding to the petition in August, Microsoft said the re-branding was based on feedback from customers. The company offered no additional response on Friday afternoon. Software Development