We wish to thank the participants who took the time to complete this survey for their contribution.

This year’s survey looked at the changing use of .NET across the development world. Overall, we have seen an increased use of .NET, both in the size of .NET teams and in the number of projects created.

1. We’re not alone
    1.1 .NET developers in the company
    1.2 .NET developers per project team
2. Small teams, short projects
3. .NET becoming more common
4. Speaking the same language
5. Frameworks: Slow transitions to new versions
6. Undecided about the new
    6.1 WPF
    6.2 WCF
7. Traditional apps most popular
8. The Microsoft world
    8.1 Microsoft framework, Microsoft database
    8.2 Microsoft framework, Microsoft IDE

1. We’re not alone
1.1 .NET developers in the company

We see that .NET has been sufficiently implanted in companies that we are starting to see large groups of developers working with it. Even as it continues to evolve, .NET is considered a mature technology and companies have embraced it. They have made the decision to develop with .NET, as indicated by the almost 20% of respondents who work with a 20 or more of .NET developers. Another 36% of respondents work with medium sized teams of 4 to 20 developers.

1.2 .NET developers per project team

In contrast to Section 1.1, the project teams of .NET developers are smaller. .NET has not yet attained the status of C++ or Java, which are more entrenched technologies associated with larger projects. With .NET, we see that only 8% of respondents are working on a project with 10 or more developers. The majority of respondents (61%) indicate that they are working on a medium-sized project of 2 to 9 colleagues. .NET technology is largely accepted and adopted, but has not yet reached the point where it is used frequently for “mission critical projects”. In coming years, it is likely that the size of .NET development teams will continue to grow, and it will be interesting to see if this hypothesis will be confirmed.

Top

2. Small teams, short projects

We asked respondents about the average duration of a .NET project. When the results are broken down between large and small teams, we see a relationship between the size of the team and the length of their projects. As would be expected, smaller teams tend to work on shorter projects. For the small teams (1-9 developers), almost 90% of their projects are of one year or less. The limitations of a smaller team suggest that they would normally work on smaller projects, completed in a shorter timeframe.

As the team gets larger, so does their percentage of long-term projects. For teams of 10-50 developers (medium teams) the percentage of short-term projects drops to 75%. Large teams (50 or more developers) work almost equally on long-term (44%) and short-term (56%) projects.

Top

3. .NET becoming more common

Respondents were split equally between the categories. As the adoption rate of .NET has grown, we see a greater percentage of projects within a company developed with it. The segments of 0 - 20% and 20 - 50% of projects are likely indicators of organizations that are just beginning to develop with .NET. A larger percentage of projects developed with .NET suggested that it is more entrenched within the company.
This increasing penetration of .NET is indicative of its maturity as a technology, and we expect a greater weight in the higher percentages in the future.

Top

4. Speaking the same language

Over time, we see that Delphi and C++, two pre-existing languages that have been adapted to .NET are being used less and less frequently, and account for less than 10% of respondents each. Other languages remain stable at approximately 10% of use. In contrast, C# and vb.net, the two languages proposed by Microsoft, are both very popular. C# has seen a small decline in use recently, while vb.net has grown to be, at 70%, the most popular language used.

When we look at C# and vb.net by size of team, we see that C# is used much more by large teams of over 20 developers. vb.net, primarily used for small projects, is used more often by small and medium-sized teams. This is another trend that will be interesting to follow in the future.

Top

5. Frameworks: Slow transitions to new versions

FFrom 2005 to 2007, as new versions have become available, there has been a shift in the most popular version of .NET.

In 2005, .NET 1.x was the only framework available. In 2006, when .NET 2.0 was released, we saw a sharp decline in the use of 1.x and a corresponding rise in the use of .NET 2.0. Some respondents continued with both versions, using 1.x for projects already started in that environment, and beginning new projects in 2.0.
In 2007, this trend continues. We see the continued decline of .NET 1.x, a slower rise in the use of .NET 2.0, and the emergence of the first projects created with .NET 3.0 and 3.5.

It will be interesting to see what will happen in 2008, and whether .NET 3.0 or 3.5 will supplant earlier versions as the best-used, especially now with four different versions on the market.

We then broke down the 2007 results by size of development teams:

Only 34% of small teams are using .NET 1.x. As we have seen, smaller teams tend to work on shorter projects, and have been able to migrate to the newer versions of .NET more quickly. We see the same trend with the release of 3.0 and 3.5. While almost all of the large teams are using 2.0, only 80% of the small teams continue to use it.
Roughly half of the larger teams, who are likely working on long-term projects started in the version 1 environment, continue to use .NET version 1.

Conversely, the larger teams have been able to move to the newer versions of .NET more quickly. Not only do they maintain and develop 2.0 applications but they also have the ability to start staff working with the newer versions of the framework.

Top

6. Undecided about the new

6.1 WPF

Almost two thirds of respondents do not know whether or not they will migrate to WPF. Because this technology is new, there remains some uncertainty regarding its use, and many companies are still evaluating its potential.

For the respondents who have made a decision regarding the move to WPF, 34% of overall respondents (85% of those who had made a decision) intend to start using it. Only 6% responded that they do not intend to migrate to the new technology.

We also looked more closely at the companies who intend to move within the next year (21% of overall respondents). When broken down between small and large teams, we see that the smaller teams intend to move more quickly. 14% of small teams intend to move within six months, whereas only 10% of the large teams intend to move in the same period. When we look at the longer time frame, we see the inverse, with a much greater percentage of large teams (13%) intending to migrate a year from now.

This follows logically from the earlier trends we have seen. As the smaller teams tend to have a greater number of short projects, they are able to switch more quickly to newer technologies. The larger teams, who are continuing on projects already started in previous environment, are slower to adopt the new technology.

6.2 WCF

Similar to the results of Section 6.1 regarding WPF, this technology is still new and only a third (38%) of respondents have decided whether or not to migrate. Also similar to WPF, of those who have made a decision, the majority will move to WCF, with only 6% of total respondents saying that they would never migrate.

A greater percentage of large teams (41%) than smaller teams (26%) have decided to move to WCF, no matter what the time frame.

Here we see the difference between the large and small teams. This is not tied to the reactivity of the teams, but rather to the fact that, as seen above, the larger teams are simply more inclined to move to WCF than the smaller teams.

Top

7. Traditional apps most popular

Almost three quarters of respondents develop both Winform and Webform applications. Winform applications, largely adopted, have been relatively stable (71-74%) across the years surveyed. It is currently the most popular type of application developed. Webform applications have seen a slight decline (78-71%) over time, which is likely due to the emergence of new technologies like WCF and WPF. WCF and WPF, released in 2007, have started to become more popular and we see them at 10% and 13% respectively. Webform still remains, however, a principal target of .NET developers.

Looking further, we see that larger teams tend to orient their work towards web applications (Webform, WS2.0, WCF). Small teams tend to develop more Winform and Mobile applications, which follows as these projects are shorter and better suited to the smaller team size.

Top

8. The Microsoft world

8.1 Microsoft framework, Microsoft database

Most of our respondents (over 80%) use SQLServer, as they are already working with Microsoft products. We also see that Access, another Microsoft product designed for smaller projects, is commonly used (between 25 and 40%).
While Oracle is probably the market leader in databases, here we find it as the third most popular. It is positioned towards large projects and companies and so is used less often with .NET projects, which tend to be somewhat smaller in scope. IBM_DB2, another database positioned towards large projects, is seen at a stable but small 5-7%.

When broken down by size of team, SQLServer is used relatively consistently across the two groups.
As expected, we see that the large teams more often use the databases targeted to large projects, Oracle or DB2. The smaller teams more often use Access, MySQL or MSDE, databases associated with smaller projects and smaller budgets.

8.2 Microsoft framework, Microsoft IDE

In 2005, 26% of respondents used an IDE other than Visual Studio. As Visual Studio has become more common, the use of other IDEs dropped, in 2006, to only 6% and remained stable in 2007. In 2005, 74% of developers used VS2003. Once VS2005 was released, we saw a sharp increase in the number of users for 2006, and again in 2007. There is a corresponding drop in the use of VS2003 to 42% in 2006 and even lower to 15% in 2007. This change in development environment occurs in contrast to the rate of change seen in the framework (Section 5), where movement has been much slower.

When broken down be size of team, we see that small teams are more likely (7%) than large teams (2%) to use a product other than VS, as they are likely using an open source IDE, in keeping with a smaller budget. The large teams are more likely to be using VS2003 (21%), as they tend to be slower to migrate to newer environments. VS2005 is used equally by small and large teams.