Scott Hanselman

In October of 2008 I took an informal survey on Twitter. I wanted to get an idea of what features of the .NET Framework people were using.

Also, here's the disclaimer. I did this on a whim, it's not scientific, so the margin of error is +/-101%. That said, the results feel intuitively right to me, personally.

I put the poll out again last week, adding only Silverlight to the end as an option. I realize I could have added many other subsystems and choices, but I felt it would have made this new poll too different from the original. There's certainly many ways that it could be improved as a survey, but it's best to think of it more as a "which direction is the wind blowing" question, than a survey per se.

I also didn't push/promote this survey very hard, so it got only about 1250 responses, vs. the nearly 5000 from last year, but I've kept the same color and attempted to keep the scale so one could extrapolate trends visually.

Here's the original survey:

It's also worth noting that 'NHibernate' was written into the "other" option 24 times. The poll was taken with TwtPoll.

Here's my conclusions.

• WinForms remains popular but WPF is closing the gap.
• ASP.NET MVC is nearly as popular as ASP.NET WebForms. Remember, however, that my readership 'skews Alpha' so might be more likely to be using MVC.
• ADO.NET Data Services is starting to get some of the appreciation it deserves, but the existence of ADO Datasets persists.
• Lots of folks use Silverlight, in this example set, even more than WPF.

What are your conclusions and analysis?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. I am a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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