Another awesome stuff for developers from Microsoft! This past Wednesday Microsoftie Karsten Januszewski announced the Visual Studio Achievement Beta at Channel9. Guess what? as a developer, you are writing hundred lines of code every day without even getting noticed by the community!!? Well, you will get noticed now. Here is an extract from the official post from Channel9:

Bring Some Game To Your Code!

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!

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.

Get the Visual Studio Extension

Download the Visual Studio Achievement Extension from Visual Studio Gallery. Install the extension and fire Visual Studio, sign in with your LiveID and straight away you will achieve 5 points for installing Visual Studio Achievement Extension. Every time you achieve, a pop-up in will be shown inside Visual Studio IDE.

Show off your achievements

Now you are earning some achievements huh!? Why not show it off on your blog. Grab the script to show off your Visual Studio Achievements. You can see my achievements widget on the right hand side of my blog. Just in case you don't like the widget, then you can customize the look and feel using CSS and providing additional parameters. You can see more widget examples here and customize it as you like. Apart from this you can also see the leading achievers at the Leaderboard.

The Achievement API

Introducing the Achievement and that too with API is super awesome. I haven't gone through the Achievement API yet, but if you are planning to write a custom tool then mash it up and share with the community.

Visual Studio Achievements Legend

So, what are the achievements that we are going to get? There are 6 different badges at the moment and we are going to see more badges in future. Here is a snap of the 6 badges:

Need to know more in detail about these badges then read about them here. Let's get started people, bring some game to the code you write from now on!!

Related Links:

• Visual Studio Achievements - Channel9
• Visual Studio Achievements - The Announcement
• Visual Studio Achievements - Widget
• Visual Studio Achievements - API
• Karsten's Blog

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Visual Studio comes up with loads of stuff making everyday life of a developer easy. But there are few extensions which Microsoft and other developers have created and are available for free to the community members. I have compiled a list of free and powerful extensions which will take your programming experience few more steps ahead with Visual Studio.

NuGet Package Manager

You should have a very good reason if you are not using this or if you are not aware what NuGet is. NuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development.

Visual Studio Achievement Extension

Get noticed, earn achievements while you write code. An awesome extension from Microsoft for programmers to get them in light while they right code. Bring on the game to the code!!

Productivity Power Tools

A powerfull extension from Microsoft with tons of features to make your work a lot easier. A MUST HAVE for every developer.

VSCommands 2010

VSCommands provides code navigation and generation improvements which will make your everyday coding tasks blazing fast and, together with tens of essential IDE enhancements, it will take your productivity to another level.

PowerCommands For Visual Studio 2010

PowerCommands 10.0 is a set of useful extensions for the Visual Studio 2010 adding additional functionality to various areas of the IDE.

Web Essentials

You must have witnessed most of the features provided by this extension in VS 2011 Developer Preview. For Visual Studio 2010, you can make use of these features with this extensions.

JSEnhancements

This extension provides outlining and matching braces highlighting features for Visual Studio JavaScript and CSS editor. Works both in JS/CSS files and HTML script/style blocks. Outlining is like in C# editor. It outlines {}s, []s and #region tags.

DevColor

Microsoft has now introduced feature in Visual Studio 2011 Developer Preview, it is a color picker stuff in the CSS window for the ease of the developers so they don't have to remember the color codes. But for Visual Studio 2010 developers this is an excellent extension that gives you a similar flexibilty.

CSSCop - FxCop for Stylesheets

We use FxCop to follow beat coding practices, but we neglect when we work with CSS. CSSCop makes it easy to adhere to best practices for writing stylesheets. It catches common errors that affect browser compatibility and much more. You can think of it as FxCop for stylesheets.

FxCop Integrator

Image Optimizer

Adds a right-click menu to any folder and image in Solution Explorer that let's you automatically optimize all PNG, GIF and JPEG files in that folder. The optimization doesn't affect the quality of the images, but optimizes them using industry proven algorithms for removing EXIF and other metadata.

Code Compare

Code Compare is a powerful file and folder comparison tool that demonstrates new level of code comparison.

Spell Checker

The next time you comment on your code or someone else code, be sure that you are using the correct spellings. Plain text files, source code comments and strings and thing that are not HTML/ASP tags are spell checked.

GhostDOC

A great extension which will automatically generates XML documentation comments for methods and properties based on their type, parameters, name and other contectual information.

Numbered Bookmarks

Creating bookmarks in Visual Studio and then remembering them is a tough task when you have thousands lines of code. Numbered Bookmarks allows users to create and recall bookmarks by using numbers. User can create 10 bookmarks (starting from 0 to 9). User can add or navigate to the particular bookmark by using the same shortcut key.

Snippet Designer

The Snippet Designer is an open source plugin which enhances the Visual Studio IDE to allow a richer and more productive code snippet experience.

For the moment, this is it, but I will update the list once I get to know more excellent extensions. Are you aware of any other extensions you think is really cool and excellent, then please do share with me/us.

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I can't stop blogging about this. I found this image on Facebook and thought I should share on my blog too.

Read and laugh and let me know your comments too.

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This is great stuff. If you own a website or a blog you should use this excellent feature of pinning fav links of your site on user's Windows 7 taskbar. Though this feature of IE9 was on hype since it's beta realease. Now it's time to use this feature for my blog. But before you start grab the latest stable version of the Pinify (formerly know as IE9ify) from Codeplex.

About Pinify
This plugin is written in jQuery and is hosted on Codeplex. I highly recommend you to follow this project on Codeplex. This plugin is not just about pinning, but also allows the user to customize the skin of the browser, adds a jumplist of your favourite links to the taskbar, overlay icons, tasks and thumbbar buttons. This is a total different user experience for the users /readers of your blog or site.

Preparing your site for the new experience

By now you have downloaded the latest release of the pinify from Codeplex. Open your site in Visual Studio and get to the head section. Fire the below NuGet command to install the Pinify plugin.

 

For the simplest implementation of this plugin, use the below script in the head section of your page.

<script src="Scripts/jquery-1.5.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="Scripts/jquery.pinify.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

<script type="text/javascript">
$().ready(function () {
     $('head').pinify();
});
</script>

Hit F5 and make sure you have selected IE9 as your default browser. After you see your site home page in the browser hit F12 to get the IE9 developer window. Under HTML tab expand the Head tree and you will come to see few meta tags.

Drag and drop the tab to your task bar. This time a new IE window will open but with a difference. Check out below, the navigation buttons has a different color, the site has an icon also.

In the above screenshot you can see the default IE icon because I have not set the favicon for my site. Once I set the fav icon in the head section of my page, I will then have a new favicon to show off. Same is with the navigation buttons, here what you are seeing is the default color, you can set your own like yellow or red or some other different color which matches the theme of your site.

 

Let's take a bit more complicate example. Now I want to do the same for my blog. For the moment I will have the following in the jumplist.

• Archives - Link to my blog archive.
• Twitter
• Facebook and
• Contact Me

The icon will be the same as my current favicon. To implement pinify for my blog I do all the work in master page which is site.master in my case. Copy and paste the below script in the head section of your page. Change the text and links accordingly.

<script src="Scripts/jquery-1.5.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="Scripts/jquery.pinify.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
        $().ready(function () {
            $('head').pinify({
                applicationName: 'Midnight Programmer',
                tooltip: 'Programming For Fun',
                tasks: [{
                    'name': 'Archive',
                    'action': 'http://midnightprogrammer.net/archive.aspx',
                    'icon': 'favicon.ico'
                },
                {
                    'name': 'Twitter',
                    'action': 'http://twitter.com/prashantmx',
                    'icon': 'twitter.ico'
                },
                {
                    'name': 'Facebook',
                    'action': 'http://facebook.com/khandelwal.p',
                    'icon': 'facebook.ico'
                },
                {
                    'name': 'Contact Me',
                    'action': 'http://www.midnightprogrammer.net/contact.aspx',
                    'icon': 'favicon.ico'
                }]
            });
        });
</script>

After adding the script drag the tab to the taskbar and right-click it to view the task list.  

There are many other things which you can do with this plugin. I have just showed a simplest way to get you jump started with pinify. As you are reading this post try dragging the tab on your windows taskbar and right-click to see the task list as shown above.

Check out this video at Channel 9 by Brandon Satrom creator of pinify.

There are many things which can be done with pinify. To know more read the below links.

• Pinify - CodePlex
• NuGet Gallery - Pinify
• Pinned Sites: Windows 7 Desktop Integration with Internet Explorer 9
• Brandon Satrom post on Pinify 

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To get the latest news on Microsoft products use the TechNet widget on your blog or website. You can generate it from TechNetWidget and from the location of your choice. I am using India to get all the latest information on Microsoft products.

To get started, go to http://technetwidget.com and select country (of your choice, I have selected India) to show the TechNet news from that area/zone.

Click Give me the Default Widget to get the default widget. The widget is in silverlight. This will give you the code to embed the widget which you can use in your blog or website. If you want to Customize Widget by your Interest, the widget generator gives you the below options to customize.

• Customize by Keywords
• Customize by Form Factor
• Customize by Product Lines

Once done you can get the widget, which is now customized to show the news you have set.

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