

How to prevent Visual Studio 2012's all caps menus - rbanks
http://www.richard-banks.org/2012/06/how-to-prevent-visual-studio-2012-all.html

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tshadwell
It's an interesting change. I remember watching a documentary recently about
the development of motorway signs in the UK. When considering the psychology
of recognising words quickly, Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert realised that
the caps-only typography of the time would slow down the time it took for
drivers to recognise a sign- properly capitalised sentences have more
distinctive shapes, allowing people to skim read them. more:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_font> It's interesting that when using
VS 2012, I do tend to actually have to read the words, rather than just
recognise them.

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archangel_one
I often think, on seeing new releases of Microsoft products with "features"
like this, that they simply have too many people who don't know how to leave
well enough alone. Each of the last few versions of VS seems to include a lot
of unnecessary UI churn - 2008 had a bunch of subtle but pointless changes,
2010 looks gratuitously different to every other Windows app and now in 2012
they're fiddling with the menu capitalisation. I'd much rather that they left
all that alone and spent half that effort just fixing bugs - better C++0x
support, make Intellisense actually work (I hear that one may have happened
anyway in 2010?), fix the funky weird bugs in the text editor, fix some
crashes.

I can only assume that they're adding a lot of visible bling changes because
they think that will drive more upgrades, but honestly, the menus were fine as
lower case. Leave them alone.

~~~
JosephHatfield
The Developer division is just another group of people within Microsoft with
their own goals. The connection between them and the Office division or the
Windows division is incidental. In my opinion, Visual Studio has been going
downhill ever since version 6.

~~~
archangel_one
I'm not quite sure, but assume that the connection to Windows/Office you talk
about is in response to my suggesting that the menus should be consistent with
everything else? I see that as more of a UI principle than a consequence of
how closely the teams are bound within MS.

I think there have been good features since; the VC++ compiler improved a lot
in 2003 and the ability to debug into STL containers (IIRC, 2005?) is
brilliant. I just wish I could get things like that without the bloat* and UI
churn.

*: yes, I know "bloat" is an overused term, but honestly, VS2008 is several gigabytes and takes an hour and multiple reboots to install, plus another half-hour for the service pack. I find that a bit extreme for what is basically a compiler and, as described in another thread, a glorified text editor.

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MichaelGG
The only reason that makes any sense is that this feature is a distraction, to
draw criticism away from the rest of the UI changes (flat, grey) and other
issues like the overwhelming crazy focus on Metro.

This way, they can do something visible, moronic, then backpedal, and claim
"hey we fixed the issue requested by 95% of customers!"

Or at least I want to believe that, because the alternative is too horrible to
contemplate.

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ot
In the UserVoice site linked on the announcement there is a feature request to
remove ALL CAPS. It already has 2000 votes, maybe they could change their
mind? After all, they did for the colors given the huge feedback.

[http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-
studi...](http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-
studio/suggestions/2628203-remove-all-caps-)

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JonnieCache
How on _earth_ did they get like that in the first place?

~~~
robgough
In their article where they announced the new UI, the explicitly stated that
they removed all caps from the panel headers as people didn't like it, and
then in the line below immediately said they'd put the menu items in all caps.

I actually read it twice and laughed out loud. No idea what they were
thinking. Thankfully it looks like we can turn it off!

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mkup
Install the new Visual Studio 2012! It is two times more visual than the
previous one!

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kabdib
Years ago, I overheard a hallway conversation about some performance tuning
they were doing in VS 200x. Apparently they discovered several thousand hash
tables during the startup of the IDE.

Not instances of hash tables. They found several thousand /implementations/ of
hash tables.

While I'm sure this story expanded every time it was told, I'm also sure there
was a kernel of truth to it.

Software is hard.

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bprater
Does anyone have info as to why Microsoft decided to go with an all caps menu?

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bztzt
They wanted to reduce the prevalence of lines, borders, etc. in the UI, so
they needed another way to distinguish the menu items from other text.

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atesti
Excellent!

Now we just need someone who goes in the ressources and changes them to the
old icons from VS20008.

Maybe it's even possible to hack away the rest of the Metro design ugliness

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mariusmg
Too much noise for such a insignificant thing.

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crazygringo
Not insignificant at all. Good product and interface design is the
accumulation of 1000's of details all done right.

Just a couple of interface missteps can have a hugely negative effect. In this
case, many people are justly bothered by the sight of a menu appearing to yell
at them, a menu that may sit on their screen for eight hours a day.

More than this, such a bad design decision is a symbol of a broken product
design process at Microsoft, which means it's probably not just the menu bar
alone.

~~~
mariusmg
It's a freaking IDE !!! There's no good interface design when it comes to
IDEs. Everything that matters is to make everything configurable cause people
will tweak things to their own liking.

Also i'm not even looking at menus. Keyboard shortcuts FTW.

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jarekkardas
to remove ALL CAPS you download this extension from visaul studio gallery:
[http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a83505c6-77b3-...](http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/a83505c6-77b3-44a6-b53b-73d77cba84c8)
It can also make menu lowercase or even hide it altogether.

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Brajeshwar
Eh! Remember they have another software; they explained the reasoning behind
different sized menus and buttons.

