I started a twitter poll the other day on what people thought about having the Ribbon control be in Visual Studio as the primary menu system (not just having the control to plug into your own applications). The Ribbon control appears in Microsoft Office, WordPad and even Paint. It’s a way to bring many of the often buried menu options to the fore front and make most often used commands and operations more accessible.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading of documents in Word recently and when I’m mostly reading I want as much real estate as I can get. The ribbon at the top of the screen can take up quite a bit of space, but did you know you could hide it? If you double-click on any of the tab names it will put the ribbon into a “hide mode”. The ribbon disappears and all you see is the single bar with the ribbon tab names on it.

If you are interested in Windows Azure, you might want to check out the Windows Azure Storage Team blog. They have recently started a series called “Understanding the Scalability, Availability, Durability and Billing of Windows Azure Storage”. At the time of this blog post they have the first in the series up and it well worth the read.