These new achievements can be earned in JavaScript, C#, VB and C++. Some examples include: I Like To Move It Move It which is earned by using the accelerometer and The Play Is The Thing which is earned by using the AutoPlay contract. You can see a complete list of the nineteen new achievements below.

If you are new to Visual Studio Achievements, check out this post.

Download It

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If you already have the extension installed, you can update the extension right from the Visual Studio Extension Manager.

Complete List of New Achievements

• BRAVE NEW WORLD (10 points) Run Visual Studio 2012 on Windows 8. Welcome to the future. Learn more.
• Crouching Coder, Hidden Worker (10 points) Use background tasks. Can be earned in Javascript, C#and VB. Learn more about supporting your app with background tasks using JavaScript and HTML. Learn more about supporting your app with background tasks using C#/VB/C++ and XAML.
  
• Did You Bring Enough For The Whole Class (10 points) Support the share target contract. Can be earned in Javascript, C#, C++ and VB. Learn more about receiving shared content in Javascript and HTML. Learn more about receiving shared content in C#/VB/C++ and XAML.
  
• Feed Me (10 points) Consume an RSS/ATOM feed using Syndication APIs. Can be earned in Javascript, C# and VB. Learn more about syndication in Javascript. Learn more about syndication in C#/VB/C++ and XAML.
  
• Fifty Shades Of Data (10 points) Inherit from BindableBase. Can be earned in C# and VB. Learn more about BindableBase.
  
• Finders Keepers (10 points) Use the search contract. Can be earned in Javascript, C#, C++ and VB. Learn more about adding search to an app in Javascript and HTML. Learn more about adding search to an app in C#/VB/C++ and XAML.
  
• First Contact (10 points) Use the contact contract. Can be earned in Javascript, C# and VB. Learn more about managing user contacts using JavaScript and HTML. Learn more about managing user contacts using C#/VB/C++ and XAML.
  
• I Like To Move It Move It (10 points) Use the accelerometer to respond to user movement. Can be earned in Javascript, C# and VB.Learn more about responding to user movement in Javascript and HTML. Learn more about responding to user movement in C#/VB/C++ and XAML.
  
• Knowledge Is Power (10 points) Do a profiling session. Can be earned in Javascript, C#, C++ and VB. Learn more about profiling.
  
• Long Distance Diagnostics (10 points) Do a remote debugging session. Can be earned in Javascript, C#, C++ and VB. Learn more about remote debugging.
  
• Mine! Mine! Mine! (10 points) Register for file associations. Can be earned in Javascript, C#, C++ and VB. Learn more about How to handle file activation using JavaScript and HTML. Learn more about How to handle file activation using C#/VB/C++ and XAML.
  
• Pinch Hitter (10 points) Use the semantic zoom control. Can be earned in Javascript, C# and VB. Learn more about semantic zoom in Javascript and HTML. Learn more about semantic zoom in C#/VB/C++ and XAML.
  
• Say Cheese (10 points) Use the camera settings contract. Can be earned in Javascript, C# and VB. Learn more about capturing a photo or video using the camera dialog using JavaScript and HTML. Learn more about capturing a photo or video using the camera dialog using C#/VB/C++ and XAML.
  
• See Me In 3D (10 points) Use stereoscopic display. Can be earned in C++. See the following code sample for a reference implementation: Direct3D stereoscopic 3D sample.
  
  
• Set It And Forget It (10 points) Use of asynchronous programming patterns. Can be earned in Javascript, C# and VB. Learn more about asynchronous programming in Javascript. Learn more about asynchronous programming in .NET.
  
• The Play Is The Thing (10 points) Use an AutoPlay contract. Can be earned in Javascript, C#, C++ and VB. Learn more about auto-launching with AutoPlay using JavaScript and HTML. Learn more about auto-launching with AutoPlay using C#/VB/C++ and XAML.
  
• Turn Me On (10 points) Use the background audio declaration. Can be earned in Javascript, C#, C++ and VB. Learn more about how to play audio in the background using JavaScript and HTML. Learn more about how to play audio in the background using using C#/VB/C++ and XAML.
  
• Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right (10 points) Support all four rotations. Can be earned in Javascript, C#, C++ and VB. Learn more about guidelines for different rotations.
  
• Would You Like To Play A Game (10 points) Use the game explorer extension. Can be earned in Javascript, C#, C++ and VB. Learn more about creating a game definition file.

Yep Achievements! In Visual Studio!

You can now download a Extension that adds Achievements to your Visual Studio. As you code, you earn. And of course there's a leader-board, widgets and even a community created WP7 app!

Interested? First check out this post, http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/C9team/Announcing-Visual-Studio-Achievements

Then, if you haven't already, Download it today from the Visual Studio Gallery

I mentioned a community WP7 app (oh and he's made the source available too)? Check out these posts from a Friend of Channel 9, Den Delimarsky

• Visual Studio Achievements for Windows Phone - Developing the core
• Visual Studio Achievements for Windows Phone - What it looks like
• Visual Studio Achievements for Windows Phone - User details & official project page
• Visual Studio Achievements for Windows Phone - Storage
• Visual Studio Achievements for Windows Phone - Final notes before the beta
• Visual Studio Achievements for Windows Phone in Beta

And finally let us know what you think! 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.

A 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.  With Visual Studio Achievements Beta, your talents are recognized as you perform various coding feats, unlock achievements and earn badges.

Learn More About Visual Studio

Visual Studio is a powerful tool with tons of features, many of which you may not know about.  Earning some of the badges may result in learning about features you didn’t even know existed!

Azure Achievements

With Version 2.0 of the extension, we've added 15 new achievements all based on Windows Azure cloud development, which you can read more about here.

Download It

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How It Works

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:

Figure 1 - Unlocking An Achievement

In addition, your Channel 9 profile is updated with any achievements you earn, recalculating your position on the leaderboard:

Figure 2 - The Visual Studio Achievements 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 47 achievements awaiting to be unlocked, all of which are listed here. Here's what the 7 different badges look like:

The Six Categories of Achievements
Customizing Visual Studio	Don't Try This At Home	Good Housekeeping
Just For Fun	Power Coder	Unleashing Visual Studio
	Windows Azure

Share Your Flair

Each time you earn a badge, a unique page is created with your profile picture, the badge and a description. You can tweet about achievements you earn and/or share them on Facebook:

Figure 3 - Share A Page

Or, you can show a list of achievements on your blog using the Visual Studio Achievements Widget which is as simple as adding one line of script to your page. After all, those badges look so shiny and nice! Here's an example of the widget on a blog: 

Figure 4 - The Visual Studio Achievements Widget On A Blog

The widget uses our Visual Studio Achievements public API, which you are welcome to access to create your own mashups and apps.

Genesis

We have to give props to 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!

Feedback

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.

Download Now

Visual Studio 2010 Professional, Premium or Ultimate.  Achievements marked with Uses FxCop only work on Visual Studio 2010 Premium or Ultimate unless FxCop is installed. FxCop is a free download and can installed from here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=6544.

Are you going to release any more achievements? I have a great idea for an achievement. Where can I suggest it?

Yes, we are planning to release more achievements for Visual Studio. Please use the Q&A section of the achievements extension to make suggestions for future achievements.

I performed the action of a progress-based achievement multiple times (aka, "Used 'Organize Usings' 50 times") but it only updated the counter once.  What gives?

You can only earn progress-based achievements once a minute.

I did what I was supposed to earn an achievement, but it didn't unlock.

Some achievements are a bit finicky; there may be multiple ways to accomplish the task in Visual Studio but only one way to unlock the achievement. Keep your eye on the Q&A section of the achievements extension for additional discussion about individual achievements.

Is there a screencast about this?

Check out this video on Visual Studio Toolbox, which has a walkthrough of the extension and discusses more about how and why we built this.

How do I see my achievements in Visual Studio?

Once the extension is installed, there is a menu item called Achievements, under the Tools menu:

How do I see my achievements on Channel9?

Once you've installed the extension, an achievements page gets created on Channel9 at http://channel9.msdn.com/niners/username/achievements/visualstudio. This lists all your achievements, both locked and unlocked.  You can find a link to this page on your profile page, which looks like this:

I installed it but it doesn't work at all! What gives?

Is there an underscore in your username? There was a bug with Version 1.0 of the extension if that is the case. Version 1.1 of the Visual Studio Achievements Extension addresses this issue of users with an underscore in their Channel9 username.  If you installed version 1.0 of the extension and registered with a username that had an underscore, you will need to take the following steps. 

1. Go to Tools --> Extension Manager...
2. Click Updates and update the Visual Studio Achievements Extension
3. Restart Visual Studio
4. Go to Tools --> Options --> VS Achievements and click the Change User button
5. Log in and authorize the app

Follow these steps in this exact order and you should be good to go!

I installed it and I can earn achievements, but the server never gets updated.

Version 1.2 (uploaded 2/2/2012) should address the experience where you were able to install the extension and VS notified you that you earned achievements, but then your profile was never updated on Channel9.There's no reason to upgrade to this build otherwise. We believe many people reporting issues with proxies will be fixed by this build.

In specific, some proxies were sending a Expect: 100-Continue header from the HttpWebRequest class, which the server wasn't prepared to handle. The fix was to set the static System.Net.ServicePointManager.Expect100Continue property to false.

Also, when you upgrade your extension, if you get a certificate mismatch error, install this hotfix: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=38654, which will address updating this extension and any other extensions. If you don't want to install the hot fix, you can manually uninstall the extension and then reinstall with the new version.If you are still having issues with your proxy server and this build doesn't solve your problems, please post here and we will continue to investigate the proxy problem.

Some of these achievements promote bad coding practices. Aren't you doing a disservice to engineers by giving badges for bad coding practices?

A few of thoughts on that. First, the "Don't Try This At Home" category was designed to be playful -- in jokes for developers. Second, any badges in that category award zero points. Third, all of the awards in this category are pretty egregious, except perhaps the GOTO achievement, which is a source of contention, as it turns out!  Ultimately, one goal of VS Achievements is to add some humor to the levity of coding.

The Visual Studio team should be spending time working on the product, not turning the IDE into a game! What's up with that?

This project is a Coding For Fun project built by the Channel9 team; no Visual Studio product devs were deployed in the making of this add-in!

To get a list of all achievements as JSON, do an HTTP GET to the achievements page like this: http://channel9.msdn.com/achievements/visualstudio?json=true

To get a list of a user's achievements, do an HTTP GET to the user's achievements page. For example, getting all my achievements looks as follows: http://channel9.msdn.com/niners/karstenj/achievements/visualstudio?json=true. Simply replace the karstenj with any user who has registered for achievements and you'll be good to go. Note that this will return a merged set of achievements the user has earned combined with the achievements a user has not earned yet, just like is shown in the UI.

To get a list of the user's achievements that only shows earned achievements, do an http GET to the user's achievements page passing the querystring raw=true.  For example, using my username of karstenj the url would look like this:http://channel9.msdn.com/niners/karstenj/achievements/visualstudio?json=true&raw=true.

To get JSON-P, pass the additional querystring callback={callback_name}.

We've got a sample coming that shows how to use this API to add a widget to your blog, displaying the achievements you've earned. Check back soon!

You may see some updates to Channel9 as we begin rolling out the infrastructure for this service and do some additional testing.  Check back and soon you'll be able to download it and start earning achievements!