The gamification continues, and if getting badges and medals is your thing and you're a Windows Phone developer, then you might want to pick up on Den's Visual Studio Achievements application for your smartphone. As well as seeing your personal achievements, you can share them with your friends, and compare yourself to others in a quest to find out who's the best collector, er, coder.

You can read more about the Achievements System at Microsoft's Channel 9. It works through a small plug-in that runs as a background thread, looking through your code each time you press the compile button. From that various awards can be handed to you, including "Magic Numbers: Write a enum with 30 fields. Who needs numbers when you've got words!" and "Save a Tree: Print source code. My boss told me to. I swear!"

While the hard-boiled devs might look down on this, I think it's a fantastic way to make Visual Studio more acessible, and point out some of the more advanced features in a friendly way to new users. Whoever decided this was a good idea deserves their own medal.