Get you code game on!
A good friend of mine, who works at Microsoft, pointed my to fun new add-on for Visual Studio 2010 – the Visual Studio Achievements Extension.
It reminds me of what Microsoft did for the Ribbons in Office with Ribbon Hero and Ribbon Hero 2.
The idea is a little cheesy, but fun never the less – and they do know how to sell the idea:
“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.
Until now.
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 leaderboard. Now, all that hard work won’t go unnoticed! Download it today!”
The list of achievements is not that long, but is still a beta release at this point. I think it would be cool to se the list extended, to allow new VS users to explore some of the more advanced features. It would also be cool to see support for achievements in 3rd party add-on.
Go ahead and give it a try :-)
http://channel9.msdn.com/achievements/visualstudio