Is it possible in Blender to render from a view rather than a camera?  I know that there is a button called "Render this Window" that does what I want except it doesn't display shadows etc.  Coming from 3ds max I'm used to being able to render a window view as if it was a camera.  Another handy feature in 3ds Max is that you can pan, scale and rotate your perspective window until you get the right "view" on your scene and then create a camera from that view.  Can this be done in Blender?

I don't know of a way to create a camera from a view, but a top tip for camera control is to track it to an empty - this gives a scenario similar to Max where you can have a point at / focus point for the camera.

Try this tut http://www.blendernewbies.com/tutorials/video/cam_control/lesson1/cam_control1.html

That said last version of Max I used was 3.1 so I may be disconnected with modern Max :).

I found what I was looking for in relation to rendering a window view instead of the camera view.

Shift + P is the hotkey combo.

This gives a resizable preview window render of the current active view.

 Was about to suggest that.
To save yourself time, I suggest doing as I (and other Blender artist) do. Split the screen into multiple windows and dedicate on of those winds to the camera view and another to the preview view.

 Camera view will allow you to keep track of the actual view screen and still run a quick render preview test without having to render at large scale (25% is still to largefor HD projects).

 The Preview wind is used solely to preview certain angles rendered witout forcing me to loose my place in contruction of a model.

 I tend to keep these areas pretty small. I minimize the Preview window it the constent rendering starts to slow down my computer. Know this. Blender has a few glitches in it. If you change the lighting or a few other things and don't see the changes in the previews, then don't freak out. Simply press the frame key (the left and right arrow keys) once and then back to your current frame. This should slap the glitch away for your preview to work.

http://img21.imageshack.us/my.php?image=windowsample.jpg

Hope this helps as well.

SEspider,

Thanks for the tips.  It's always good to know about the glitches and how to work around them.

Using windows: get the desired view you want and simply control+ Alt+ numpad 0. This will snap the active camera to the current window view

Eiseprod,

Thanks for the tip,  thats just what I was looking for.