A survey intended to capture the pulse of the .NET developer
community going into 2016 has been made available by Progress, the company that owns Telerik. It makes interesting reading.

The aim of this survey, which was conducted during January and February on Telerik sites was intended to get a sense of what .NET developers thinking about the latest trends in desktop, mobile and web development. There were 1,862 respondents with over 1000 of them answering all the questions.

 (click in graphic to enlarge)

The survey demographics suggest that the typical .NET developer has more than 11 years experience and is office based. Just half of them still occupy the role of "Developer" with over a third having moved "up", either to a management role (22%) or assume the responsibilities of an "Architect" (14%). Three-quarters of respondents to this survey have at least a college degree with over a quarter having done a higher degree in the field of software development.

As far as primary programming language is concerned, not surprisingly C# was the overwhelming choice.  

From the responses to a question that allowed more than one choice, 30% of respondents are targeting Windows desktop, 45% desktop web and 49% responsive web. In of the report a distinction is often made between Windows Desktop developers and Web developers. Here we are going to focus on Desktop developers. Look out for future articles about the survey's findings related to Web developers and those developing primarily for mobile.

While WPF is the most popular technology for building applications among the group of Windows Desktop developers, Windows Forms remains a strong contender even though it has been under maintenance mode for a considerable time. The new technology, UWP is only favored by 8% and 1% have already adopted the GitHub open source cross platform for the development of desktop applications.

The survey explores the degree to which .NET developers support Microsoft's UWP Apps paradigm of "write once, run everywhere". The majority of respondents stated they were not familiar with the concept and it was mobile developers who were most favorable toward UWP development, with 35% stating they agreed with the paradigm. Among desktop developers 27% were positive towards UWP while 11% were forthrightly negative - more than in any other group.

Progress probed attitudes towards cross-platform desktop applications with the direct question:

How Do You Feel about Being Able to Build and Run .NET Apps Cross-Platform?

The majority of developers were enthusiastic to a greater or lesser degree:

With regards to their tools, Desktop developers are the most loyal to Visual Studio IDE:

 Log-term commitment to Visual Studio tends to color .NET developers attitudes to changes that are currently taking place. The responses to another question:

.NET Core is Now Open Source and Cross-Platform. How Do You Feel about That?

indicated a high level of enthusiasm - as long as it didn't have adverse consequences for Visual Studio:

There's plenty more contained in the freely downloadable report, and for findings regarding web developers preferred tools see Progress Survey of .NET Web Developers.

Comments

Make a Comment or View Existing Comments Using Disqus

or email your comment to: comments@i-programmer.info