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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Which versions of C# do you regularly use?

RowColumnValue
2017201820192020202120222023
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
063%

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.

Which programming languages are you using in your .NET project?

99%

99%

C#

27%

30%

HTML/CSS

22%

26%

JavaScript

16%

18%

TypeScript

7%

6%

VB.NET

3%

3%

F#

1%

1%

Other

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.

Which runtimes do you regularly use?

RowColumnValue
2017201820192020202120222023
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
096%

The survey ran in June 2023, when the .NET 8 Preview was on the verge of being announced.

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.

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.

Which technologies and frameworks do you use?

56%

56%

ASP.NET Core

39%

41%

Entity Framework

34%

ASP.NET

24%

25%

Azure

23%

22%

Unity

Which ASP.NET Core technologies do you use?

This question was shown only to respondents who reported using ASP.NET Core.

78%

Web API

64%

MVC

40%

Razor pages

20%

Minimal API

19%

SignalR

16%

Blazor Server

12%

Blazor WebAssembly

9%

gRPC

2%

Other

Which frameworks do you use for F# development?

32%

Giraffe

27%

Fable

21%

Saturn

19%

Fantomas

16%

FAKE

13%

Paket

9%

FParsec

3%

Falco

6%

Other

35%

None

Which IDE / editor do you mostly use for C# development?

RowColumnValue
2020202120222023
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
0%65%

Which operating system does your C# development environment use?

79%

80%

Windows

32%

34%

macOS

19%

18%

Linux

What plugins do you use with Visual Studio?

32%

36%

ReSharper

9%

SonarLint

6%

4%

AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio

6%

8%

CodeMaid

5%

5%

ReSharper C++

Which plugins for Visual Studio Code do you use?

52%

66%

C# Extensions

46%

55%

C# for Visual Studio Code

38%

33%

.NET Core Tools

25%

GitHub Copilot

23%

23%

NuGet Package Manager

Which version of Visual Studio do you use the most?

76%

56%

VS 2022

19%

38%

VS 2019

3%

3%

VS 2017

0%

2%

VS 2015

1%

1%

VS 2013

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.

Which unit-testing frameworks do you regularly use, if any?

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

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.

What performance or diagnostic tools do you regularly use, if any?

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

How often do you typically use profiling or diagnostics tools?

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

Who is responsible for profiling or diagnostics in your project?

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

Types of software being developed in Visual Studio and JetBrains Rider

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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