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They should extend the Achievements to all those brilliant hackers that keep finding new ways to write spyware + rootkits that infect MS products and render them unusable! Bonus achievement if no antispyware can remove it, or if you can manage to hide the users whole My Documents and Desktop / start menu icons and demand ransom to get your data back, all while doing so in the latest “most secure” current version of Windows, Win7!

I want to have it in any Software..
CAD
Office
….
Powerpoint:
“The Manager – Create 50 Masterslides” …
Outlook
“The Informer – Answer all in 30 E-Mails” …
“The Spy – Use BCC 10 more then 10 times”
It would be so much win

They should add one for those who are dumb enough to install/activate rootkits on their own system.

you mean “dumb enough” to use IE or any other MS product ? Agreed.

This is awesome, and as an educator and an IT guy, I know that gamification is a superb way of engaging learners and rewarding good behavior with little expense. A move like this has the potential to encourage new programmers to try new things. Everyone wins.

To get off topic, because I took the troll’s bait:
Mike, stop conducting the hate train. The Visual Studio guys have nothing to do with the Windows OS guys. That aside, Microsoft does an astonishing amount of work on system security, and they’re very successful. Linux/OSX/OS2/Inferno all benefit from security through obscurity; as far back as anyone need remember, they haven’t had the level of attention that Windows gets. If OSX were deployed on hundreds of millions of corporate workstations, it’d get more targeted attention, and you’d start seeing many more viruses. It’s just not the case, so users benefit. DBAD.

(Posted from my Mac, currently running Windows 7)

I really don’t like this idea. This is promoting people to DELIBERATELY do horrible code practices just to get some stupid achievement. Not only that but it’s a huge distraction from getting actual work done since people will waste time farming achievements instead of actually working. I hope this stays optional…

Troll bait ? The spyware I just spent 6 hours removing from a family member’s win7 computer was the real thing, not “bait”. Why am I a troll for freely talking about it ? Is Windows Spyware like rape, where people allowed it to go on for decades because everyone was afraid to talk about how horrible it is ? I think Microsoft is the troll and spyware is the bridge it lives under. It could have solved this problem long ago by using UNIX account privileges, instead it allows it to continue so that a multibillion-dollar Antivirus industry can maintain its cartel.

Linux is “security through obscurity” ? Wait …an OS whose source can be accessed by anyone in the world, even people whose countries censor the internet, is obscure ? Contrast that to a company who would pay the world’s best lawyers to sue you off the face of the planet if you had even a few lines of code they believed was theirs ? That’s NOT keeping code in obscurity ? Go study these terms before you use them in an English sentence!

He meant that no virus developer cares about UNIX, because there is a too small group of people using it.
Therefore they dont even search fore security holes and thus they are “obscure”.

Account privilegues would not change anything; the UAC of Win7 is very good and restricts the privilegues of every process, but the user can grant them full access.
So, if the user is stupid, nothing, REALLY NOTHING can keep you safe from malware, neither the UAC, nor the anti-virus software nor your great UNIX account privilegues system (users could grant root access there, too).

So stop telling this “windows is insecure” bullshit. I never got a virus, because I use my brain.
And the only fact is, that Windows has more stupid users than UNIX and so there are more infections.
Simple as that…

Mike is right, Windows should adopt the UNIX security model. Nevermind that the NT security model meets the C2 standard and the UNIX model doesn’t come close, the UNIX model is clearly superior, because it’s been tested less!

I like this extension. There would be people who would deliberately try to unlock achievements but then probably this extension is not for them… They should log on to Facebook and play farm-ville or whatever that crap is…

I am shortly recommending it on my blog and I hope people seriously start using it.

The only suggestion that I have for Channel 9 is to take off this sentence “Impress your friends!” from the below

Impress your friends!
Earn achievements while you code!
Code while you earn achievements!

Probably that is what make people do thing as Justin mentioned above. Coding is not about impressing your friends

I agree with this though

“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.”

I’ll believe UAC works when it does more than interrupt me and make my screen go dark. You know, it needs to do something useful like preventing 100 lines of Java Script run from IE from installing a rootkit that takes over the whole system. Dimming my LCD doesn’t actually help me. But I”m supposed to believe the devs on the windows team are as smart as the ones on FOSS and that theres only more bugs because of more users ? please.

I pray for the day when MS is hit with massive class-action product liability and false advertising lawsuits over their 10+ years of spyware/rootkits. The millions of users who have lost millions of man-hours and productivity deserve compensation. If this happened in the automobile industry the cars would have been recalled within the first month. But you have the audacity to belly-ache about piracy when your product doesn’t work long enough to do anything useful in the first place.

Now I convinced VS is a toy, not a tool for professionals.
I need archievment “Patient Buddha”.
With my win forms project i had “Out of memory error” twice a month in VS2005. Now great upgrade to VS2010. I can see this error twice an hour. Great job MS!

I think it’d be cool if they linked this to Xbox Live so that these achievements will actually show up in our gamerscore and list of played games.

Idea of linking ot Xbox Live is not a bad idea at all.

Security is yet biggest issue with Windows, especially if you compare with it any UNIX system.