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Microsoft gamifies Visual Studio with achievements
by Mike Rose [Console/PC, Programming]
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January 19, 2012
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Microsoft has added gamification elements to its Visual Studio development tools, enabling developers to unlock achievements and compete on leaderboards to see who writes the most sophisticated code.
The Visual Studio Achievements plug-in, which has launched as an open beta, awards users with badges based on the code that they write, and the features of Visual Studio that are used.
Microsoft software development engineer Karsten Januszewski explained that the new plug-in is "intended to be a humorous community-building game as well as a path to the many, and, to some, unknown features offered in Visual Studio."
The plug-in analyzes a background thread whenever code is compiled, and awards badges whenever particular events or actions are detected.
There are 32 achievements in total, with names such as "Regional Manager" (have more than 10 regions in a single class) and "Interrupting Cow" (have 10 breakpoints in a file). Developers are able to display earned badges on their profile page, and share achievements to Facebook and Twitter.
Leaderboards are also available, showing how your coding skills compare to other Visual Studio users, says Microsoft.
Jeff Sandquist, senior director of developer relations at Microsoft, explained, "We talk to developers every day because their work and ideas fuel our products, projects and services."
"Now there's a fun factor as well as a healthy, competitive environment for Visual Studio developers to show off their everyday contributions that are otherwise unnoticed."
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Before you consider delivering gamification plugins; how about you focus on the 1k+ known issues with Visual Studio and stop locking up my machine, crashing, or otherwise consuming all valued resources. I will happily reward YOU with an achievement if you manage to not release an IDE that is 2x slower than the version prior. Can you do that much? Do you have what it takes to earn that achievement? I didn't think so...
Useless expenses like this boil my blood. These were resources, warm bodies that could have been assigned to fix real issues. Instead we get some meta-game to consume yet more cycles from my already burdened machine? Useless...
EDIT: Funny part is how it's called "gamification", like games are about extrinsic nonsense.
Project milestones should be the only achievement.
"Are You A Wizard? (100 points)
Rather then coughing up the thousand dollars for Visual Assist X you managed to get Intellisense to work! But seriously, please email us and tell us how so we can break it properly, it’s bad for business having it working."
The google analogy fails because google's search engine actually works. You're allowed to have fun then ;)
What I can't get my head around is why so many of you are so unhappy with Visual Studio, yet you seem to go on using it. Are you really forced to use it at work? What do you use at home instead (if I may ask)? And can't you really convince your managers that you'd be so much more productive using (let's say) emacs?
Where I used to work Visual Studio wasn't enforced, yet a 95-97% of us used it leaving 2-3 people out who liked emacs better and they actually used it. I don't see the point of enforcing a tool, particularly if you hate it so much.
( ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED 0g - Code Analysis feature still useless )
Eyes on the prize. Let's keep the prize being the end-product, not the by-games littering the path.
http://www.lostgarden.com/2010/01/ribbon-hero-turns-learning-office-into.html
SO fired.
The idea of awarding badges for worst-practices is hilarious, though.
From my own experience, I've been using VS for several years in a game studio (50 to 100 people). And not just social games written in 1 or 2 months. I'm talking about 1 to 2 years production. I've never had big issues. We were developing and debugging on PC/XBox/PS3 without problems. By the same time, on project we were also developing for Wii/PS2, we had to use CodeWarrior to run the game. And, omg! This, is a crappy IDE! At such a point that I preferred alt-tab to VS, edit the code, alt-tab to CW, compile and run!
I think that if you have problem with a software, you might first take a look at your configuration. And if you can't finally get it working, just move to something else. I bet nobody requires you to use it if you're more efficient with another IDE.
BTW, I've always liked stuff like Easter Eggs, so I like the idea.
As for machine load, as a developer you should have a super shiny system anyway, to cut back on compiling & rendering times etc. ... One should go with the times (while this can be a costly affair, it is unfortunately so)
I never really had any issues with visual studio, even for bigger projects. Although it got a little slow from time to time and required some project maintenance to set things straight again.