Microsoft Uses Second Life to Promote Visual Studio

Microsoft went to the virtual world of Second Life to get Web developers interested in its Visual Studio design software, reports PR Week.

The Second Life launch event is part of a larger effort dubbed Defy All Challenges from Microsoft, meant to reach out to more social media outlets to promote Visual Studio. There is also a community of developers that has been created and maintained in-world.

The event was hosted on the Visual Studio island in Second Life, where developers could compete against each other to complete logic puzzles. Those 60 attendees who completed all ten puzzles won a plot of land on the island.

The campaign is being targeted not at developers, which allegedly already know about Visual Studio, but at those who might not know the product's full feature set or application potential.