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Visual Studio Achievements Extension

I believe Visual Studio Achievement extension is a very nice plugin to have it on Visual Studio. It is running in the background while you are doing your daily tasks to analyzes your actions and according to the progress you are going to get an achievement badge(s).

Most often developer hard work and efforts will not be noticeable, till he/she achieved a huge thing in short time or discover a hidden bug within a very short period. But having VS achievement in place, this is will not the case again. The tool will analyze actions on Visual Studio and unlocked the deserved achievement to the developer according to actions. These unlocked achievements will be posted to Channel 9 profile for the developer (thus having profile on Channel 9 is a prerequisite ).

Once you have an achievement granted, a popup will appear on the right-bottom corner of your screen with your achievement badge and you can check your achievement on your channel 9 profile at any time.

This extension is live now and you can install it from extension manager at your Visual Studio 2010. after installing it, you will be asked to restart your Visual Studio, after the first run, you will be asked to login with your Channel 9 profile.

I believe this extension represent a new way for developers to highlight their skills in a common way. The same rules applied on everybody…

It should not be the judge on developer experience but I think it is very good extension that will create a very good atmosphere between developers for a fair competition

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TransformXml Task Failed Unexpectedly Error Message While Publishing Web Project in Visual Studio 2010

 

TransformXml task failed unexpectedly

one of the strange issues that I faced yesterday while trying to publish one of the web projects that I am working on. although the project compilation was working fine and when I run the project locally on my PC it was working fine without any issue.

After investigating for this issue I found the cause of this issue because the Web.config file was containing a special character inside it. so what I did is encode the special character then try to publish it again and things worked for me fine.

I had a very large Web.config file so looking for the special characters was not an easy job. I wrote a regular expression on Visual Studio that helped me on accomplished this job. so I would recommend to use regular expression to search Web.config instead of looking for the special characters inside the web.config file.