Visual Studio Achievements: Earn Achievements for good Coding and get to know Visual Studio even better!

Check out the just released Visual Studio Achievements Extension that have just been announced on Channel 9.

Why do you get rewarded for good gameplay on the Xbox, but not for your great coding? And besides being a lot of fun, this is the perfect way to Learn More About Visual Studio and its tons of features, many of which you may not even know about. Earning some of the badges may result in learning about features you didn’t even know existed! 

Download it today from the Visual Studio Gallery 

With the Visual Studio Achievements Extension, achievements are unlocked based on your activity. Your code is analyzed on a background thread each time you compile. In addition, the extension listens for certain events and actions that you may perform in Visual Studio, reporting progress on these events to the server. 

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 leaderboard:

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, all of which are listed here.  

Each time you earn a badge, a unique page is created with your profile picture, the badge and a description. So share them on the social network or your choice!:

The blog While True, whose blog post What If Visual Studio Had Achievements inspired us to go build this. That post spawned a reddit post that is the thread which started it all!

We’re just getting started with Visual Studio Achievements and are hoping to release more in the future. If you have ideas for additional achievements, we’d love to hear about them. Please use the Q&A section of the achievements extension to make suggestions for future achievements. And if you have suggestions, concerns, issues or problems, again, use the Q&A section of the achievements gallery page. Give a read to the FAQ as well as your question may already be answered.