A name is used to reference and lookup services and environment properties.

A name functions much like a domain namespace – it consists of a sequence of name parts delimited by a ‘.’ when encoded as a fully qualified string.

• comparing a name with another name
• iterating over the name parts of a name
• returning the name prefix of a name
• returning the name part value of a name
• creating names that extend the name

Because names are created by a provider they can be initialized once and reused across multiple contexts and environments.