The 2010 .NET Survey Says
In October 2008 Scott Hanselman ran an informal poll on twitter asking people which technologies they used in the .NET Framework. The poll, which got about 5000 responses, showed some interesting results. ASP.NET WebForms was the .NET feature used by the most respondents with 3108 votes, followed by WinForms with 2668, and AJAX with 2379.
Earlier this year, he tried it again. The only change Hanselman made in the survey from a technology standpoint was adding Silverlight as an option.
In the 2010 survey, which got 1250 responses, WebForms still had the most responses with 723, followed by AJAX with 629, and WCF with 609. ASP.NET MVC had 553 responses and WinForms held its own with 516. Silverlight with 398 responses narrowly beat WPF, which had 386.
On the data management side, LINQ to SQL got 598 responses compared to Entity Framework at 287. Microsoft has indicated that it is focusing its resources on EF going forward. ADO.NET DataSets received 295 responses, ADO.NET Data Services got 109 and DynamicData seemed to be faltering with 66 responses. Hanselman thinks that maybe people are using DynamicData, but don't realize it.
Out of all the .NET technologies in the 2010 survey -- most, but not all, are mentioned here--CardSpace was at the bottom of the poll, getting no love with only 8 responses.
After a disclaimer pointing out that the poll was far from scientific, Hanselman, a high profile developer, who now works for Microsoft, said in his blog, "the results feel intuitively right to me, personally." Check out his .NET Subsystem Survey results here. Both the 2010 and 2008 survey results are shown.
As people weighed in on Hanselman's 2010 survey results, one commenter on his ComputerZen.com blog noted the difference between asking about technologies that you use everyday versus technologies that you use on new projects. Good point.
What .NET technologies are you using on new projects? How does this differ from what is used in your existing codebase? Does Hanselman's poll mirror what you are seeing?
Express your thoughts below or drop me a line at krichards@1105media.com. I'm also working on an upcoming feature for VSM that profiles projects that involve moving legacy code forward. If you have a migration story that is worth profiling, let me know.
Posted by Kathleen Richards on 01/19/2010 at 10:54 AM