I find it strange that they've moved to all-caps for menu titles (FILE, EDIT, VIEW...), especially considering Microsoft's recent uses of good typography.

All-caps is a tradeoff where you take away the identifiable shape of a word to make it draw more attention. You could argue that menu titles would be the absolute worst place to use all-caps.

The ALL CAPS MENU TITLES are supposedly "more Metro-like", even though many Metro screenshots are all-lowercase and the Metro motto is "content before chrome."

I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't made their menu titles disappear until you move the mouse near them (like Mac OS X's X-+ window buttons). That sounds like the "hide the UI so it looks good but is less usable" style Microsoft likes.

There's an extension[1] that does this. I'm now tempted to install it, at least until I find a way to back out the SCREAMING new menus. With that said, I've been using the beta for a couple months and it seems both snappier and more stable than 2010.

[1] http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/bdbcffca-32a6-...

Turn off the ALL CAPS menus with this registry value: http://www.richard-banks.org/2012/06/how-to-prevent-visual-s...

I installed the beta, which had all-caps in some of the headers. Initially I was annoyed that Microsoft has to spend so much time on changing the look of every edition of visual studio, but when I ran it, I actually liked the grey colour and the ALL CAPS.

Could you explain further how caps "take[s] away the identifiable shape of a word"?

Is [FILE] really considered less identifiable than [file] somehow?

Yes, FILE is less identifiable than file. All the letters are the same height and have similar shapes with all-caps, whereas lowercase letters have more variety and your brain can recognise the shape of words rather than looking at every single letter.

The Wikipedia page for word recognition has some useful links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_recognition

I will eat my words.

Found this too: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/05/29/visu...

I actually quite like the darkness.

Looks like this is shaping up to be the "Maddox Visual Studio, the best Visual Studio on the internet". Capital letters, black backgrounds, now we just need insulting error messages full of manliness.

I might be OK with the ALL CAPS menu titles if I understood the rationale behind them. Has this been discussed officially anywhere?

Because if not, I can't get beyond the nagging idea that MS is playing some kind of joke that I don't get, and that's a distraction that I don't need.

The best explanation I can come up with is that there's a ton of pressure for Metro this and Metro that. Partners at Microsoft must be upset Apple's market cap is twice Microsoft's, and well, they're gonna fix that no matter what.

ALL CAPS is a highly visible thing they can backpedal on; it's supposed to be sacrificed. Then they can say "See, 95% of the comments were about the menus, and we changed it, so now we're all good!" Deflects from more serious criticism, as this comment demonstrates.

There's a registry value you can set to go back to normal (title case) menus: http://www.richard-banks.org/2012/06/how-to-prevent-visual-s...

Nice. Now to figure out how to restore the ordinary window chrome, as the "active" and "inactive" states of the new title bar are identical. Try as I may, I can think of no conceivable rationale for this. Metro notwithstanding, this makes about as much sense as replacing project "files" with "friends"...

They're there to distinguish the menus from their surroundings, since they want to avoid using lines etc. to do that.

The fact that the menu titles consist of text characters isn't enough?

It's the Blend interface and I dig it too. But I like dark windows and stuff in general - I know it's not for everyone.