Jason Zander's blog post explains it perfectly:
The original name of the CLR team
(chosen by team founder and former
Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Mike
Toutonghi) was "Lighting". Larry
Sullivan's dev team created an ntsd
extension dll to help facilitate the
bootstrapping of v1.0. We called it
strike.dll (get it? "Lightning
Strike"? yeah, I know, ba'dump bum).
PSS really needed this in order to
give us information back to the team
when it was time to debug nasty stress
failures, which are almost always done
with the Windows debugger stack. But
we didn't want to hand out our full
strike.dll, because it contained some
"dangerous" commands that if you
really didn't have our source code
could cause you confusion and pain
(even to other Microsoft teams). So I
pushed the team to create "Son of
Strike" (Simon from our dev takes
credit/blame for this), and we shipped
it with the product starting with
Everett (aka V1.1).
Also, I had heard of the CLR being referred to as "COM+ 2.0" before, but apparently it's had a few names in its time (from here):
The CLR runtime lives in a DLL called MSCOREE.DLL, which stands for Microsoft Common Object Runtime Execution Engine. "Common Object Runtime," or COR, is one of the many names this technology has had during its lifetime. Others include Next Generation Windows Services (NGWS), the Universal Runtime (URT), Lightning, COM+, and COM+ 2.0
与恶龙缠斗过久,自身亦成为恶龙；凝视深渊过久,深渊将回以凝视…
