Visual Studio Achievement

A software engineer's glory so often goes unnoticed. Attention seems to come either when there are bugs or when the final project ships. But rarely is a developer appreciated for all the nuances and subtleties of a piece of code--and all the heroics it took to write it. With Visual Studio Achievements, your talents are recognized as you perform various coding feats, unlock achievements and earn badges.

With the Visual Studio Achievements Extension, various achievements are unlocked based on your activity. When you unlock an achievement, Visual Studio lets you know visually with a pop-up. In addition, your Channel 9 profile is updated with any achievements you earn, recalculating your position on the leader board. Now, all that hard work won’t go unnoticed!

There are six categories of achievements you can earn, including categories like Unleashing Visual Studio, Power Coder, Don't Try This At Home and more. Some examples of individual achievements include Regional Manager (have more than 10 regions in a single class), Close To The Metal (use 5 preprocessor directives), Stubby (generate method stubs 10 times) or Interrupting Cow (have 10 breakpoints in a file). All in all, there are 32 achievements awaiting to be unlocked.

To see a list of all the achievements, check out this page. You can also see where you and your fellow niners stand on the leaderboard. You can tweet and share your achievements on Facebook. Or, add your list of achievements to your blog. After all, those badges look so shiny and nice!

Note that the Visual Studio Achievements only works for C# and Visual Basic. Progress based achievements can only be incremented once a minute. Achievements marked with Uses FxCop only work on Visual Studio 2010 Premium or Ultimate unless FxCop is installed. Visual Studio Achievements has an API for those interested.

Download it today! Happy coding!