Visual Studio Achievements
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A bit paranoid, are we? A bit of Reflector work reveals that the only data sent to 'the server' is: - Your security credentials to verify with your Ch9 account - Data about the achievements you earned: Achievement, DateTime Earned, Progress towards an achievement, etc. This is used to include the data into your Ch9 profile, and subsequently for use in their external connectors (facebook, twitter, widgets...) so you can be social :) [aside: Its also interesting that the communication is with JSON serialization] I take it you also don't participate in the Customer Experience Improvement Program when its offered? ;P
Be The Noise
Hi, sound like a funny thing, getting "achievements". Yeah, I can be proud of getting silly "awards" mostly for problems in my code. And I tell everyone in the world what kind of code it is I'm working with, regardless of it is mine or code from newbie programmers. And links to data octopus like Facebook, Twitter and other "social" networks don't let me get a better feeling about that. Yes, the data might "only" be what you described but the data you get out of a database full of that information is a lot more. Do you really think that the Visual Studio Team at Microsoft does have the time to develop such "funny" things without targeting at a business demand? I don't believe that they have done all this in their freetime and I also do not believe that they invest their private money to set up a server farm which is fast enough to handle all the input. So if someone invest money in a company he wants to get a benefit back. The benefit is Data Mining using all the input coming from all the Visual Studio installations which uses this "feature". You could get statistical data like: - in which countries is VS installed? - how many installations of VS exists in which country? - how many developers are interested in social networks? - which kind of programming will be mostly used in VS, which programming language? - where can we invest more in developing extensions, i.e. LINQ, database support and so on? - which features of VS are mostly used, which are never or rarely used? - which exact programmer (link to account) does use which features? - how long is VS used daily? And a lot more things like that, you can get a LOT more information about the product usage than with the customer experience program which mostly will be used to report crashes and their reason to Microsoft. Yes, the "benefit" we have MAY be that the product gets a better development experience in future with all this data, but I also think that we deliver a lot of data about ourselfs daily without the knowledge what happens with all this (or the knowledge THAT we deliver data, like opening an email and downloading graphics and deliver informations to the sender that we read/open the newsletter and when and so on..). I don't think that we should support all the data madness only to satisfy other's business and their earning of money with our data. You may call it paranoid, but the examples above should let you think a little about if you want to be a transparent human. I personally prefer privacy at every point where I can
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[From the News section] So has anyone else tried this yet? http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/01/18/announcing-visual-studio-achievements.aspx[^] I just installed it yesterday, and I have to say it's actually kind of fun. Working alone from home, I usually only get recognition for finished products at a very high level, and almost never for the actual work that goes into them. It's a nice little 'attaboy', and even brings some humor to the process. I've decided not to go 'achievement hunting', and rather let them come naturally as I work. I hope MS keeps this up and adds more achievements... Although I did find it funny that I created a new project, added a DB first Entity Framework model to it, and automatically got the 'Overload' achievement from the 'Don't try this at home' category from all of the generated code. :laugh: http://channel9.msdn.com/achievements/visualstudio/MoreThan10OverloadsAchievement[^] Personally, I think they need to add an achievement for commenting your code; anyone else have ideas for achievements?
Be The Noise
Not sure getting some of them look good on your resume :laugh:
It's an OO world.
public class Naerling : Lazy<Person>{
public void DoWork(){ throw new NotImplementedException(); }
} -
[From the News section] So has anyone else tried this yet? http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/01/18/announcing-visual-studio-achievements.aspx[^] I just installed it yesterday, and I have to say it's actually kind of fun. Working alone from home, I usually only get recognition for finished products at a very high level, and almost never for the actual work that goes into them. It's a nice little 'attaboy', and even brings some humor to the process. I've decided not to go 'achievement hunting', and rather let them come naturally as I work. I hope MS keeps this up and adds more achievements... Although I did find it funny that I created a new project, added a DB first Entity Framework model to it, and automatically got the 'Overload' achievement from the 'Don't try this at home' category from all of the generated code. :laugh: http://channel9.msdn.com/achievements/visualstudio/MoreThan10OverloadsAchievement[^] Personally, I think they need to add an achievement for commenting your code; anyone else have ideas for achievements?
Be The Noise
Haven't they got more productive ways to employ their developers? Like fixing bugs. This seems such a bad idea - encouraging coders to try new add-ins, for example, can only encourage flakiness, and that's not in the "Don't try this at home" category (add to which, if I tried any of those except at home, I'd fully expect to be fired).
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[From the News section] So has anyone else tried this yet? http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/01/18/announcing-visual-studio-achievements.aspx[^] I just installed it yesterday, and I have to say it's actually kind of fun. Working alone from home, I usually only get recognition for finished products at a very high level, and almost never for the actual work that goes into them. It's a nice little 'attaboy', and even brings some humor to the process. I've decided not to go 'achievement hunting', and rather let them come naturally as I work. I hope MS keeps this up and adds more achievements... Although I did find it funny that I created a new project, added a DB first Entity Framework model to it, and automatically got the 'Overload' achievement from the 'Don't try this at home' category from all of the generated code. :laugh: http://channel9.msdn.com/achievements/visualstudio/MoreThan10OverloadsAchievement[^] Personally, I think they need to add an achievement for commenting your code; anyone else have ideas for achievements?
Be The Noise
I looked at it and then looked at the achievements available. The first thing I noticed is that every one of them was supposed to indicate a problem. Then I had the warm fuzzy feeling from thinking back to my sophomore year of high school. Back when I thought doing wrong just to do it was cool. Then I wondered just how many programmers would install this. But, it could possibly provide some interesting statistics. It might prove my theory that the world runs on crappy code.
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I looked at it and then looked at the achievements available. The first thing I noticed is that every one of them was supposed to indicate a problem. Then I had the warm fuzzy feeling from thinking back to my sophomore year of high school. Back when I thought doing wrong just to do it was cool. Then I wondered just how many programmers would install this. But, it could possibly provide some interesting statistics. It might prove my theory that the world runs on crappy code.
Kirk Wood wrote:
It might prove my theory that the world runs on crappy code.
What evidence do you need? Practically all projects suffer from one of the following: - Unrealistic requirements from somebody who is afraid that he gets too little for his money - Unrealistic deadlines because somebody is afraid that the project will cost too much - Unrealistic deadlines because the whole thing is 'a matter of life and death' Without looking at the quality of the code (or the coder), those three usually lead to crappy code before it's even written.
And from the clouds a mighty voice spoke:
"Smile and be happy, for it could come worse!"And I smiled and was happy
And it came worse. -
[From the News section] So has anyone else tried this yet? http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/01/18/announcing-visual-studio-achievements.aspx[^] I just installed it yesterday, and I have to say it's actually kind of fun. Working alone from home, I usually only get recognition for finished products at a very high level, and almost never for the actual work that goes into them. It's a nice little 'attaboy', and even brings some humor to the process. I've decided not to go 'achievement hunting', and rather let them come naturally as I work. I hope MS keeps this up and adds more achievements... Although I did find it funny that I created a new project, added a DB first Entity Framework model to it, and automatically got the 'Overload' achievement from the 'Don't try this at home' category from all of the generated code. :laugh: http://channel9.msdn.com/achievements/visualstudio/MoreThan10OverloadsAchievement[^] Personally, I think they need to add an achievement for commenting your code; anyone else have ideas for achievements?
Be The Noise
I can't wait until managers start using this in reviews... Manager - "Let's see, you only accomplished 50/1000 coding accomplishments this year - no raise for you" Stranger things have happened ;)
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I already get achievement points for my code. I call it a paycheck.
No comment
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[From the News section] So has anyone else tried this yet? http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/01/18/announcing-visual-studio-achievements.aspx[^] I just installed it yesterday, and I have to say it's actually kind of fun. Working alone from home, I usually only get recognition for finished products at a very high level, and almost never for the actual work that goes into them. It's a nice little 'attaboy', and even brings some humor to the process. I've decided not to go 'achievement hunting', and rather let them come naturally as I work. I hope MS keeps this up and adds more achievements... Although I did find it funny that I created a new project, added a DB first Entity Framework model to it, and automatically got the 'Overload' achievement from the 'Don't try this at home' category from all of the generated code. :laugh: http://channel9.msdn.com/achievements/visualstudio/MoreThan10OverloadsAchievement[^] Personally, I think they need to add an achievement for commenting your code; anyone else have ideas for achievements?
Be The Noise
Wait, wait. Are there people who actually think this isn't bogus? If I needed a trumpet fanfare and a badge every time I accomplished something at work, I'd have switched careers long ago. Programming is a very internal art form. You have to be satisfied by the problem solving and the elegance of the result. Achievements in video games exist for the purpose of getting you to spend more hours playing the game. By extension, we might ask what microsoft wants to gain by putting achievements into visual studio. Yeah, you might say it's all fun and games, but maybe not. Maybe the purpose is to make you more dependent on the features of visual studio, to make yuu less likely to switch O/Ss and build tools. Beware of geeks bearing gifts.
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Wait, wait. Are there people who actually think this isn't bogus? If I needed a trumpet fanfare and a badge every time I accomplished something at work, I'd have switched careers long ago. Programming is a very internal art form. You have to be satisfied by the problem solving and the elegance of the result. Achievements in video games exist for the purpose of getting you to spend more hours playing the game. By extension, we might ask what microsoft wants to gain by putting achievements into visual studio. Yeah, you might say it's all fun and games, but maybe not. Maybe the purpose is to make you more dependent on the features of visual studio, to make yuu less likely to switch O/Ss and build tools. Beware of geeks bearing gifts.
Member 2941392 wrote:
If I needed a trumpet fanfare and a badge...
Don't 'need' it per se... its just kind of fun. With the stresses of our work, getting more 'fun' any way you can just sounds like a good idea.
Member 2941392 wrote:
Yeah, you might say it's all fun and games, but maybe not.
Why do so many people on this thread think there has to be some sinister underlying motive to this thing? Lighten up people! ;P
Member 2941392 wrote:
Maybe the purpose is to make you more dependent on the features of visual studio, to make yuu less likely to switch O/Ss and build tools.
Visual Studio itself pretty much had this in the bag since v1 ;)
Be The Noise
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Hi, sound like a funny thing, getting "achievements". Yeah, I can be proud of getting silly "awards" mostly for problems in my code. And I tell everyone in the world what kind of code it is I'm working with, regardless of it is mine or code from newbie programmers. And links to data octopus like Facebook, Twitter and other "social" networks don't let me get a better feeling about that. Yes, the data might "only" be what you described but the data you get out of a database full of that information is a lot more. Do you really think that the Visual Studio Team at Microsoft does have the time to develop such "funny" things without targeting at a business demand? I don't believe that they have done all this in their freetime and I also do not believe that they invest their private money to set up a server farm which is fast enough to handle all the input. So if someone invest money in a company he wants to get a benefit back. The benefit is Data Mining using all the input coming from all the Visual Studio installations which uses this "feature". You could get statistical data like: - in which countries is VS installed? - how many installations of VS exists in which country? - how many developers are interested in social networks? - which kind of programming will be mostly used in VS, which programming language? - where can we invest more in developing extensions, i.e. LINQ, database support and so on? - which features of VS are mostly used, which are never or rarely used? - which exact programmer (link to account) does use which features? - how long is VS used daily? And a lot more things like that, you can get a LOT more information about the product usage than with the customer experience program which mostly will be used to report crashes and their reason to Microsoft. Yes, the "benefit" we have MAY be that the product gets a better development experience in future with all this data, but I also think that we deliver a lot of data about ourselfs daily without the knowledge what happens with all this (or the knowledge THAT we deliver data, like opening an email and downloading graphics and deliver informations to the sender that we read/open the newsletter and when and so on..). I don't think that we should support all the data madness only to satisfy other's business and their earning of money with our data. You may call it paranoid, but the examples above should let you think a little about if you want to be a transparent human. I personally prefer privacy at every point where I can
I would have called it massively paranoid actually.
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Good that you remind me, yet another one for the list: Passing more than 30 parameters to a method. Again the old projects would earn this instantly.
And from the clouds a mighty voice spoke:
"Smile and be happy, for it could come worse!"And I smiled and was happy
And it came worse.CDP1802 wrote:
Passing more than 30 parameters to a method
But to really qualify they have to have meaningless name. e.g. P1, Q1, A, Q2, P(), etc I once inheritted a FORTRAN program in which everything was passed in COMMON areas rather than by parameters where the areas looked like
COMMON/P/P(15) COMMON/Q/Q(22) COMMON//YOU,MUST,BE,JOE,KINGYes - that is really what they contained. I spent weeks reverse engineering the code to determine what each of the elements in P() represented - it wasn't ever used as an array, it was a set of discrete values. It was just a lazy programmer's way of saving time when punching cards. P.S. Code Project doesn't have a language highlighter for FORTRAN
