Why should gamers have all the fun? Microsoft's latest addition to Visual Studio introduces an achievement system that allows the code monkeys working behind the scenes to earn achievements for their work, show them off to their friends, and compete on leaderboards against software engineers from around the globe.

The Visual Studio Achievements Extension analyses the code you enter on a background thread each time you compile and listens for certain events and actions that you may perform in Visual Studio. As the actions are detected, they are reported to the server which keeps track of your progress.

Whenever you accomplish a task a bar pops up at the bottom of the screen congratulating you on your achievement, just like on the Xbox 360 or Games for Windows Live.

The plug-in is in beta at the moment and there are currently 32 achievements across six categories, from 'Good Housekeeping' to 'Don't Try This At Home'.

Examples include:

Regional Manager (have more than 10 regions in a single class)
Close To The Metal (use 5 preprocessor directives)
Stubby (generate method stubs 10 times)
Interrupting Cow (have 10 breakpoints in a file).

Download the beta now through Channel 9.

Thanks Gamasutra.