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Joystiq

Microsoft put games in your code so you can game while you code games

by Jessica Conditt on Jan 19th 2012 5:30PM

Microsoft has turned coding into an online competitive game with Visual Studio Achievements, a plug-in that offers badges, leaderboards and the ability to share programming progress on Twitter and Facebook. Visual Studio Achievements is in open beta right now and offers 32 achievements in six categories: Customizing Visual Studio, Don't Try This At Home, Good Housekeeping, Just For Fun, Power Coder and Unleashing Visual Studio.

Some of the badges are aimed at getting coders to discover more elements of Microsoft's Visual Studio, while others are general programming milestones, such as Regional Manager -- have more than 10 regions in a single class -- and Interrupting Cow -- have 10 breakpoints (Moo) in a file.

Via: Gamasutra
Source: Channel 9

Tags: coding, mac, Microsoft, pc, programming, Visual-Studio, Visual-Studio-Achievements

Reader Comments (41)

who use vb anyway

@wqerty Who codes in C++ and C#? A ton of people. This is Visual Studio, not Visual Basic, this IDE is used by loads of developers.

@wqerty
Er, Visual Studio is easily the most widely-used IDE on Windows (and probably overall). It doesn't just support VB.Net: most C++ development, and very nearly ALL C# development, for Windows is done in VS. Those three languages encompass about 99% of programs written for Windows.

But anyways, the achievements are meant to be a joke, they're not serious.

@wqerty

Pictured above is C#, not VB.

Honestly, that's not a bad idea. It'll definitely be that one thing that turns people who want to learn how to code into people that are learning how to code.

Now how many more posts do I have to write to get an achievement of my own?

@Ferrous

ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED

Inquisitive personality

@Ferrous

Not with those achievements. The ones pictured teach bad habits, not good ones.

Jesus, when will Excel and Word get achievements too?

@(Unverified)

Take a look at Ribbon Hero.

@(Unverified)
learning to code is a bit more difficult than learning office, and giving starters an incentive to bite through the first steps is certainly something a lot of people gonna appreciate. i don't see the harm, especially since its optional.

In case anybody didn't actually read the achievements (or know absolutely nothing about programming) they're all just jokes. I mean, more so than VB already is.

An achievement for having a load of Magic Numbers? 100 fields in a single class? Using GOTO?!?

Oh, how me and my CS buddies lol'd

@lSpam

"or know absolutely nothing about programming"

I'd assume that's most people. I have no idea what you're talking about.

@lSpam I love how the one for GOTO specifically calls you out for being an awful coder.

@TraceurRyuk Part III
The achievements they list are embarrassing code practices. As an analogy, it's describing things like buying every gaming keyboard to play a single game, using 3 monitors to play minesweeper, have a mouse that has 50 buttons on it etc..

@Once known as Shadsy
"I love how the one for GOTO specifically calls you out for being an awful coder."
^ THIS! ^

@lSpam That's the thing. Some of these are meant as a kind of a "shame on you for having that achievement" but in jest of course. It's all good.

No, just no.

Most of those achievements are for bad code.

Haha, Awesome! Were one step closer to hopefully getting atleast 25GS(Regulated) for Indie Games

If they had these in Eclipse, I'd have over 9000 Horstmann points. Thumbs up if you get the reference :D

@The Nasty Nick
This isn't youtube, prick.

Is "lolwut" appropriate here?

You kids. When I started coding, we made up our own achievements in our minds. The day I changed my homebrew RPG to use integers instead of floats for HP, I earned 100 points. No longer did the iron golem do 9.326 damage!

Also, please implement a feature to allow upvoting an article title, and relax the restrictions so I can do it 1,000,000 times.

It has begun:
http://www.g4tv.com/videos/44277/dice-2010-design-outside-the-box-presentation/

@PS1
Thank you, PS1. You are as insightful as to the gestalt of this as your hardware was to a generation of gamers learning to live outside the shadow of Sega and Nintendo. Does 'Visual Studio' need Achievements? Of course not? Is it a clever way to teach ideas to new users, something applicable damn well everywhere? Absolutely. Surprisingly clever from Microsoft.

Make fun of VB all you want kids. Plenty of full fledged business applications are(were) written with it. Get over yourselves

@stonedauwg But, dood! It's soooooo oooooold!!! The only ones that don't care that you aren't hip are your clients (the ones actually paying).

I hope they add ones for VS crashing.

Achievement Unlocked: VS crashed 10 times in a row without any user intervention.

@ungeheier now that's funny right there

Do I get an achievement for record number swear words at VS2010?

Coming from someone that use Vb. I hope this is some joke programing and achievement don't mix in my opinion.

I'd like to try.

But I'd be delighted to learn basic programming first.

I always was very interested in coding can some please tell me were I could learn from my home and what do I need.

@Science core

Check out Code Year, a free weekly course that teaches you how to program.

http://codeyear.com/

Microsoft does have plenty of free programming software for beginners or lightweight programming. Not everything requires the $10k MSDN Ultimate Subscription

free stuff: http://www.microsoft.com/express and http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix/

@psm0110

You don't even need MSDN for Visual Studio.

What hasn't anyone done this before? I want to see this in Eclipse....

As someone who's in a C# class, I could care less. I freaking HATE programming, can't wait to get back into networking

@Chopin
You hate it, but you could care less, I see. Ultra mega hate?

Are these achievements counted together with my xbox game achievements?

LOL that's incredible! I feel obligated to get this plugin

If you have more than 10 regions in a single file, you have failed at OOP.

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Breaking News

Microsoft put games in your code so you can game while you code games

Reader Comments (41)

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 5:35PM wqerty said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 5:46PM iTz FiNaL said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 5:50PM BlueRajasmyk said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 6:20PM Raffi256 said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 5:36PM Ferrous said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 5:59PM MrAlex said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 6:11PM sqlrob said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 5:37PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 6:21PM Raffi256 said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 7:01PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 5:39PM lSpam said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 5:46PM TraceurRyuk Part III said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 5:54PM Once known as Shadsy said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 6:06PM onlyk said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 9:59PM Mike DPad said

Posted: Jan 20th 2012 1:09PM 2late2die said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 5:42PM sqlrob said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 5:43PM killer rin said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 5:45PM The Nasty Nick said

Posted: Jan 20th 2012 12:30AM KirbyCommando said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 5:45PM EliminatorZigma said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 5:50PM CrumbBum said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 5:56PM PS1 said

Posted: Jan 20th 2012 2:41AM A11smart said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 5:59PM stonedauwg said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 6:37PM WeRequireMOARMinerals said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 6:07PM ungeheier said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 6:12PM stonedauwg said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 6:08PM onlyk said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 6:34PM bargaingamer said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 7:04PM Shadowbender said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 7:18PM Science core said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 8:53PM vincentj7 said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 7:58PM psm0110 said

Posted: Jan 20th 2012 2:08AM This Little Man Says His Name Is said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 8:42PM freelancer91 said

Posted: Jan 19th 2012 10:41PM Chopin said

Posted: Jan 20th 2012 2:48AM darkinchworm said

Posted: Jan 20th 2012 5:57AM ahleung said

Posted: Jan 20th 2012 9:33AM Grimbear13 said

Posted: Jan 20th 2012 7:10PM asdfkeyboardman said

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