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.
Re:Visual Studio 2012 RC Available Now
by CamperBob2 on Friday June 01, 2012 @03:24PM
(#4055208)
The fact that the menu titles consist of text characters isn't enough?
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.