while true blog » What if Visual Studio had Achievements?

What if Visual Studio supported achievements, just like games on Steam, Xbox or PS3? Bragging to your coworkers about which one you’ve just unlocked, imagine that! Here’s a little proposed list for some of them. .NET / C# flavored, of course.

• Falling Down – Created a new SharePoint project
• Job Security – Written a LINQ query with over 30 lines of code
• The Sword Fighter – 5 Consecutive Solution Rebuilds with zero code changes
• Shotgun Debugging – 5 Consecutive Solution Rebuilds with a single character change
• The Mathematician – Defined 15 local variables with a single character name
• The Academic – Written 1000 lines of F#
• Spaghetti Monster – Written a single line with more than 300 characters
• Wild One – Mixed tabs and spaces for indentation more than 5 times in a single line
• The Organizer – Created a Solution with more than 50 projects
• The Portal – Created a circular project dependency
• The Multitasker – Have more than 50 source files open at the same time
• The Code Keeper – Uninstalled Resharper because it made you redundant
• Pasta Chef – Created a class with more than 100 fields, properties or methods
• Procedural Programmer – Created a method with more than 10 out parameters
• Steam Powered – Added Visual Studio as a Steam game
• The Poet – Written a source file with more than 10,000 lines
• The Enterprise – Build Solution took more than 10 minutes
• Highway to Hell – Successfully created a WCF service
• The Explainer – Written a comment with more than 100 words
• TPS Reports – Created a Crystal Reports Project
• Rage Quit – ALT+F4 after a failed bug fix
• Ooooh Shiny – Written 100 extensions methods
• Look Ma – Written an infinite Fibonacci generator using yield
• The Engineer – Killed a zombie with The Wrench
• The Architect – Created 25 Interfaces in a single project
• The Right Way – Test method is longer than the tested method
• The Defender – Checked every argument for null exceptions
• Pokemon Programming – Caught all the exceptions
• Black Magic – Implemented a RealProxy
• Gimme back my ASM – Used ILGenerator
• I’m Sorry – Created a new Visual Basic Project
• The SEO Expert – ASP.NET MVC Routing table with more than 100 routes
• The Matrix – Windows Forms with more than 100 controls
• The Daredevil – UpdatePanels nested more than 3 layers deep
• Just a Test – Nested multiline C-style comments that caused a compilation error
• Warm Bath – Successfully consumed a non .NET SOAP web service
• Old School – Defined more than 100 static objects
• The Cloner – Copy-pasted more than 50 lines
• The Dependency – Referenced more than 30 projects
• Paying the bills – Imported a Visual Basic project
• First Hit – Included a Codeproject.com library into your project and it actually compiled
• Paula – Define a firstname field with value Brillant
• Every Option Considered – Created an enum with more than 30 values

Inspired by Steam Holiday sales and Battlefield Bad Company 2. Odd web coding exposed on the most minimalistic company page possible. Enjoy.

Good question. And how can we make it happen?