C#
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The C# questions were only shown to the developers who chose C# as one of their three primary programming languages.
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2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
– | – | – | – | – | – | 42% | C# 11 |
– | – | – | – | – | 50% | 32% | C# 10 |
– | – | – | – | 30% | 32% | 17% | C# 9 |
– | – | – | 52% | 50% | 33% | 17% | C# 8 |
28% | 44% | 63% | 48% | 39% | 24% | 13% | C# 7 |
63% | 44% | 39% | 27% | 27% | 16% | 8% | C# 6 |
37% | 40% | 35% | 27% | 27% | 5% | 3% | C# 5 |
10% | 11% | 11% | 6% | 5% | 2% | 2% | An earlier version |
7% | 11% | 8% | 10% | 12% | 10% | 18% | I’m not sure |
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Stefan Pölz
Clean C# Coder – Test-driven .NET Developer
My heart fills with joy when I see that the majority of participants are keeping up with the current STS and LTS versions of C# to harness the syntactic sugar and semantic power of the language.
99%
99%
C#
27%
30%
HTML/CSS
22%
26%
JavaScript
16%
18%
TypeScript
7%
6%
VB.NET
3%
3%
F#
1%
1%
Other
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Stefan Pölz
Clean C# Coder – Test-driven .NET Developer
I expected C# to be the most used .NET language, not least because it's also the language the BCL is written in. However, I'm surprised there's still more Visual Basic than F# in use, considering the latter also receives yearly feature updates.
2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
– | – | – | – | – | – | 38% | .NET 7 |
– | – | – | – | – | 47% | 38% | .NET 6 |
– | – | – | – | 33% | 24% | 10% | .NET 5 |
96% | 90% | 85% | 75% | 62% | 49% | 45% | .NET Framework |
37% | 42% | 57% | 68% | 66% | 43% | 35% | .NET Core |
16% | 17% | 14% | 13% | 12% | 10% | 8% | Mono |
– | – | – | – | – | 5% | 6% | I’m not sure |
The survey ran in June 2023, when the .NET 8 Preview was on the verge of being announced.
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Stefan Pölz
Clean C# Coder – Test-driven .NET Developer
A fair split between the current STS and LTS versions of the platform. Learning that there are still a significant number of .NET Framework projects being maintained is valuable information for library and tool authors to not drop support for the classic just yet.
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Joseph Guadagno
Microsoft Developer Services MVP, president of the .NET Foundation Board of Directors
It's good to see that usage of .NET Framework is declining, although a bit slowly. Usage of .NET seems to be split between versions 6 and 7. Hopefully, that means people are preparing to update their apps to .NET 8.
56%
56%
ASP.NET Core
39%
41%
Entity Framework
34%
–
ASP.NET
24%
25%
Azure
23%
22%
Unity
2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | |
---|---|---|---|---|
65% | 62% | 54% | 48% | Visual Studio |
20% | 27% | 33% | 32% | JetBrains Rider |
11% | 9% | 10% | 14% | Visual Studio Code |
2% | 2% | 2% | 3% | Visual Studio for Mac |
0% | 0% | – | 1% | MonoDevelop |
0% | 0% | 0% | 1% | Vim |
0% | 0% | 0% | 1% | Other |
79%
80%
Windows
32%
34%
macOS
19%
18%
Linux
32%
36%
ReSharper
9%
–
SonarLint
6%
4%
AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio
6%
8%
CodeMaid
5%
5%
ReSharper C++
76%
56%
VS 2022
19%
38%
VS 2019
3%
3%
VS 2017
0%
2%
VS 2015
1%
1%
VS 2013
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Joseph Guadagno
Microsoft Developer Services MVP, president of the .NET Foundation Board of Directors
This is great that more and more developers are staying up to date with the latest versions of their IDE.
19%
16%
I don’t write unit tests for C#
7%
5%
I write unit tests, but I don’t use any frameworks
37%
39%
xUnit
36%
38%
NUnit
14%
14%
MSTest/Visual Studio Unit Testing Framework
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Stefan Pölz
Clean C# Coder – Test-driven .NET Developer
It saddens me to see that the percentage of C# developers not writing unit tests has increased. But perhaps the recent versions of JetBrains tools can improve that figure with their superb suite of unit testing features.
20%
–
Visual Studio’s built-in debugger Diagnostic Tools
21%
–
Visual Studio's built-in Performance Profiler
22%
17%
dotMemory
21%
20%
dotTrace
12%
13%
Unity Profiler
73%
74%
From time to time when issues occur
18%
19%
Regularly: each day / week / sprint to predict issues
9%
6%
Constantly: it is an ongoing background process
0%
1%
Other
31%
28%
I am solely responsible
30%
35%
A few other developers and I share the responsibility
26%
24%
Every developer in our project is responsible
13%
10%
Nobody in our project is responsible
0%
2%
Other
55%
53%
Websites
42%
40%
Utilities
30%
15%
Games
30%
20%
Libraries / Frameworks
27%
35%
Database / Data Storage
57%
55%
Websites
46%
46%
Utilities
34%
25%
Libraries / Frameworks
31%
16%
Games
28%
39%
Database / Data Storage
It looks as though many developers automatically reach for Visual Studio to work with their database projects, even though JetBrains Rider has excellent tools that support virtually every type of database, not just MS SQL Server.
In gamedev, however, JetBrains Rider is recognized as a top choice, no doubt thanks to its interoperability with engines like Unity, Unreal Engine, and Godot.
Thank you for your time!
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