Stack Overflow Dev Survey: VS Code, Visual Studio and .NET Shine -- Visual Studio Magazine

Stack Overflow Dev Survey: VS Code, Visual Studio and .NET Shine

By David Ramel
07/26/2024

In this year's big Stack Overflow developer survey things are much the same for Microsoft-centric data points: VS Code and Visual Studio still rule the IDE roost, while .NET maintains its No. 1 position among non-web frameworks.

It's been this way for years, though in 2021 it was .NET Framework at No. 1 among IDEs, while the new .NET Core/.NET 5 entry was No. 3. Among IDEs, there has been less change.

"Visual Studio Code is used by more than twice as many developers than its nearest (and related) alternative, Visual Studio," said the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer survey, the 14th in the series of massive reports, released this week.

VS Code and Visual Studio retained their top two positions in every category except "Other Coders," where Notepad++ beat out Visual Studio for second place.

**[Click on image for larger view.]** IDEs -- All Respondents *(source: Stack Overflow).*

"Integrated developer environments, loved and criticized by many developers, consistently rank Visual Studio Code and its nearest (and related) alternative, Visual Studio, as the top two most popular options even though there are so many to choose from," SO said in a related blog post. "Developers like to learn, but this may be where they draw the line before implementing a change that crosses over into frustration territory. If there were an opportunity to switch things up, developers might opt for Neovim which is highly admired (83 percent). Visual Studio Code users are in fact only interested in trying Neovim or Vim next year."

Among web frameworks/technologies, ASP.NET Core and ASP.NET ranked seventh and ninth, respectively.

Non-Web Frameworks and Libraries — **[Click on image for larger view.]**Web Frameworks and Libraries *(source: Stack Overflow).*

As noted, among non-web frameworks, .NET was No. 1, with the old .NET Framework still showing strong in fourth place. Microsoft's .NET MAUI even made the list, used by 3.1 percent of respondents, good for 22nd place.

".NET is the most used among other frameworks and libraries again this year for all developers," SO said. "Those learning to code are using NumPy and Pandas the most (as they were last year)." Also, .NET ranked highly on the admired/desired question, placing first in the latter and fourth in the admiration department.

In other words, things haven't changed much at all for Microsoft's dev tooling wares. Here are some related data points:

Microsoft SQL Server was fourth in databases, a category topped by PostgresSQL.
Microsoft Azure was second among cloud platforms, led as always by AWS.
Microsoft Teams was No. 1 among synchronous tools.
Bing AI and Visual Studio IntelliCode placed fourth and fifth among AI Search and Developer Tools, behind ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot (GitHub is owned by Microsoft) and Google Gemini.

The survey is based on data collected from 65,437 responses from 185 countries from May 19, 2024 to June 20, 2024.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer for Converge360.

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