I’m going through the lab at the end of Chapter 3 of Victor’s book – a recap of the steps until now are basically thus:

Create new project, tell the project to include an image in its solution, open the solution into the workspace and  convert it to a 3d object, then rename it to 3DImage.

What Blend automatically does when renaming it, is apply an underscore at the beginning of the name and after the attempt to ‘correct’ this, it reverts back to _3DImage.

In my previous experiences with blend(its actually been a few months since I’d played around in Blend, so I’m truely beginning to wonder if I’m mixing this functionality up with something else), the use of the underscore (_) before any letter or number has been a nice way to allow for the UI to apply an alt shortcut (hotkey).

For example, if I were creating my own browser (if you ever decide to go through some of the more introductory C# development tutorials provided with Visual Studios, the creation of an internet browsing application is something you’ll likely go through.  Visual studios makes it pretty simple to accomplish this type of application), I’d set the menus “File” “Edit” “View” “History” etc. to have hotkeys for those who are interesting in accessing these menus with their keyboard instead of mouse.  To do so, I’d name them “_File” “_Edit” “_View” “Hi_story”, etc.

This will result in the menus appearing in the application as such:

File  Edit  View  History

These would make each item accessible by holding the alt-key down while hitting whichever character is underlined.

So its interesting that Blend is automatically placing an underscore at the beginning of the name.  Alternatively, I recall in the process of designing an interface (which I’m redesigning, but will eventually have available here on Facing Blend) having troubles whenever using a number in my namespace.  It wouldn’t build the application.  However, when replacing the number for the word (1 replaced for One), it would build.

Perhaps this is blend’s self-protection?