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Visual Studio Achievements

 

What is Visual Studio Achievements?

Gamification is an idea behind Visual Studio Achievements. Visual Studio is a powerful tool and it contains many features which you may not know about it. Visual Studio Achievement is something you earn when you unlock the Visual Studio feature. It is an add-in to Visual Studio and works with Visual Studio 2010 professional and above. If you are having a Visual Studio professional edition then you need to download FXcop to add-in work.

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Download the Visual Studio achievements from here

When you launch Visual Studio it prompts Channel9 login, you have enter your Channel9 credentials. This is just one time process and it is just an installation step.

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This add-in run in the background and does not effect your experience as a coder and it is going to talk with server every-time when you un-lock the feature. As soon as you authorize and install the application you will then get the below prompt.

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In Visual Studio you do something in your code and you are not necessarily need to know about it then you will earn that achievement.  There are few achievements which you can see here. You can also get these achievements from tools and achievements.

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It is fun for the developers. It is something which you do in day to day job but some features which you do not know can be learn and get some achievement points. Some achievements you have to do once but some you may have try several times to break it.

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Debugging the 3 startup projects!

Most achievements you earn after you compile your code. Suppose if you use organize usings 50 times then you earn 7 points which you can do as shown below

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You can not do this over and over again, that is cheat. You can only unlock them once a minute. Incremental achievements unlock when you reach the target count and it is stored in server.

Another achievement example is Equal Opportunist

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You will earn this when you use private,protected,public and internal variables in a class. It is just learning a new thing and gamification which is every where in these days. It also got leaders board with their names and points achieved.

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Visual Studio achievements also got an API which you can interact and you can use with windows mobile and can show the achievements in phone. Soon team is going to release a widget which you can place in your BLOG as shown below

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At the moment there are 32 achievements in this add-in.It is all about recognizing the developers. There are so many moments in developers life while doing the coding which are now recognized by this add-in. There are additional achievements which are planning to release in near future. So Download it and install it and get as many as achievements possible.

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About the author

Kalyan Bandarupalli

My name is kalyan, I am a software architect and builds the applications using Microsoft .NET technologies. Here I am trying to share what I feel and what I think with whoever comes along wandering to Internet home of mine.I hope that this page and its contents will speak for me and that is the reason I am not going to say anything specially about my self here.

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