"Visual Studio Achievements, a Visual Studio plugin, enables developers to unlock badges and compete against one another for a place on a leaderboard based on the code they write, its level of sophistication, and the Visual Studio capabilities they use to do so," the Microsoft blog explained.

"Visual Studio Achievements is both playful and pragmatic. Built on ideas from the developers themselves, it is intended to be a humorous community-building game as well as a path to the many, and, to some, unknown features offered in Visual Studio."