What's the Top App Model Used by .NET Developers? -- Visual Studio Magazine

What's the Top App Model Used by .NET Developers?

By David Ramel
04/30/2021

Echoing an earlier report on the popularity of ASP.NET in the .NET/C# tech stack, a new survey from the .NET Foundation finds the web framework dominates the ranking of app models used by respondents.

We reported on that earlier survey, "DevSkiller IT skills report 2021: Demand and hiring trends," in February.

"ASP.NET is seen in almost half of all .NET/C# tech stack," the DevSkiller report said. "ASP.NET leads the way for the .NET/C# tech stack once again with a whopping 45.93 percent. This is the second year running where the ASP.NET web app framework has topped the list, highlighting the continued importance of web development in the .NET/C# tech stack.

".NET server technology, SQL Server (36.90 percent), overtook MVC (36.35 percent) by a narrow margin to come in second place this year. Not far behind was .NET Core with 26.04 percent, while Entity Framework came in the fifth position with 19.35 percent."

Top .NET/C# Stack Skills in earlier DevSkiller Report — **[Click on image for larger view.]** Top .NET/C# Stack Skills in Earlier DevSkiller Report *(source: DevSkiller).*

The brand-new .NET Foundation survey's .NET Usage component finds much the same thing, with ASP.NET variants dominating the list of most-used app models, topped by ASP.NET Web API. Like the earlier survey, it's followed by a data-oriented component in second place, this one being Entity Framework instead of SQL Server. Overall, six ASP.NET variants pepper the top 10 list. After ASP.NET Web API at No. 1, listed by about 74 percent of 4,459 respondents, they are:

ASP.NET MVC (No. 3)
ASP.NET SignalR (No. 6)
ASP.NET Blazor (No. 7)
ASP.NET Razor Pages (No. 8)
ASP.NET WebForms (No. 10)

Here's the full list:

**[Click on image for larger view.]** Which .NET App Models do you use? *(source: .NET Foundation).*

The web focus is prevalent in another question asking about what types of apps respondents are building, with the top two answers being web services/APIs and web apps, followed by console, libraries, miroservices, native desktop apps, mobile apps and games:

**[Click on image for larger view.]** What type of apps are you building? *(source: .NET Foundation).*

Other questions about .NET usage and the top three responses for each include:

Which .NET App Models do you use?
1. .NET 5
2. .NET Core 3.1 LTS
3. .NET Framework 4.0 - 4.72
What SPA framework are you using?
1. Angular
2. Blazor
3. React
What development tools do you use?
1. Visual Studio
2. Visual Studio Code
3. GitHub
What languages are you currently using?
1. C#
2. JavaScript
3. TypeScript
What languages have you used in the last year?
1. C#
2. JavaScript
3. TypeScript
What languages are you interested in learning?
1. C#
2. Rust
3. TypeScript
Which cloud providers do you use?
1. Microsoft Azure
2. Amazon Web services
3. None

This first-ever survey of the .NET community survey by the .NET Foundation was conducted from Nov. 1, 2020, to March 31, 2021, collecting 4,509 responses. Full methodology, as well as a data dump of the raw results, along with other survey components touching upon .NET Foundation Awareness & Value, Open Source Participation and Participant Demographics, is available here.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Compare New GitHub Copilot Free Plan for Visual Studio/VS Code to Paid Plans

The free plan restricts the number of completions, chat requests and access to AI models, being suitable for occasional users and small projects.
Diving Deep into .NET MAUI

Ever since someone figured out that fiddling bits results in source code, developers have sought one codebase for all types of apps on all platforms, with Microsoft's latest attempt to further that effort being .NET MAUI.
Copilot AI Boosts Abound in New VS Code v1.96

Microsoft improved on its new "Copilot Edit" functionality in the latest release of Visual Studio Code, v1.96, its open-source based code editor that has become the most popular in the world according to many surveys.
AdaBoost Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the AdaBoost.R2 algorithm for regression problems (where the goal is to predict a single numeric value). The implementation follows the original source research paper closely, so you can use it as a guide for customization for specific scenarios.
Versioning and Documenting ASP.NET Core Services

Building an API with ASP.NET Core is only half the job. If your API is going to live more than one release cycle, you're going to need to version it. If you have other people building clients for it, you're going to need to document it.