I've been using (publicly available) pre-release versions of Visual Studio 2012 since late last year.
The all-capital elements certainly appear to be a stylistic design decision but it's used so sparingly (and less so now) that it's difficult to complain about. If it's not for style then it's a brilliant channeling of focalism in a release with hundreds if not thousands of changes:
"What's wrong?"
"The menu casing - the main menu is all in capital letters!"
"That's all?"
[Pause]
"You mentioned a discount if I buy today, right?"
Not to sound like a shill, but the IDE includes a number of practical improvements over 2010 that are much appreciated. Projects now load in the background, search has been embraced and works extremely well, and for all of the complaints about the UI it's a lot less visually noisy and just feels better to work with over longer coding sessions.
That is not all, there is also a distinct lack of contrast in both brightness and color all over, also all icons look pretty much the same so they're essentially useless.
In an effort to "focus on the content" everything else have taken a back seat, to hell with useability and a visually pleasing experience.
The all-capital elements certainly appear to be a stylistic design decision but it's used so sparingly (and less so now) that it's difficult to complain about. If it's not for style then it's a brilliant channeling of focalism in a release with hundreds if not thousands of changes:
"What's wrong?"
"The menu casing - the main menu is all in capital letters!"
"That's all?"
[Pause]
"You mentioned a discount if I buy today, right?"
Not to sound like a shill, but the IDE includes a number of practical improvements over 2010 that are much appreciated. Projects now load in the background, search has been embraced and works extremely well, and for all of the complaints about the UI it's a lot less visually noisy and just feels better to work with over longer coding sessions.