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A quick glimpse at our reader survey results |
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By Brian Eastwood
29 Oct 2007 | SearchWinDevelopment.com
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First, some generalities about the SDLC, none of which, frankly, surprise me.
- Security, scalability and performance are the biggest challenges in application development. For architects, performance, legacy integration and scalability are the top three concerns.
- Coding and architecture are the two phases of the software development life cycle in which you are likely to spend the bulk of your time.
- Finally, team development, Agile development and other means of collaboration gather, en masse of course, at the forefront of your collective minds.
Like I said, nothing earth-shattering there. 'Twould be akin to yours truly indicating that I devote the plurality of my day to writing. (Trying, and failing, to deploy rapier wit stands at a close second.)
Some interesting information emerges, though, when one considers the rate at which SearchVB.com readers are adopting certain technologies.
- Eight percent of respondents are already using Visual Studio 2008, and another 32% intend to use it pretty soon.
- On the client side, more than 25% of respondents are using ASP.NET AJAX, and an additional 17% intend to use it. Comparatively, fewer than 20% of respondents intend to use or are currently using Windows Presentation Foundation, and about 15% of you are seriously looking at Silverlight.
- As far as Web services go, 40% of respondents are not building Web services are all, and those who are prefer ASMX to ASP.NET, which 66% of respondents use, compared to roughly 30% for ASP.NET AJAX, but it has garnered a lot of attention in a short period of time.
- As our friends at the recently renamed SearchSOA.com can attest, implementing Web services and service-oriented architecture remains a struggle -- so much so, in this case, that respondents' companies seem to be avoiding them.
- Just as WCF isn't quite setting the .NET world on fire, neither, it seems, is fellow .NET 3.0 library Windows Presentation Foundation. More than 40% of respondents are using Windows Forms for client applications, and nearly 30% are using Visual Studio Tools for Office. As for WPF? Fewer than 9%.
Now, in addition to providing SearchVB.com some insight into the wonderful world of .NET application development, the reader survey offers some clues into what interests our readers and, therefore, what it makes sense for us to cover.
In essence, the survey results indicate that our approach -- which tries to mix coverage of fun, exciting, cutting-edge technology with less glamorous but more widely used tools -- appears to be the proper one. It seems that you the reader are simultaneously introducing yourself to the Next Big Thing while ensuring that you can properly design, code, deploy and maintain applications with tried-and-true products and methodologies.
Within the next couple weeks SearchVB.com will offer a more in-depth look at our survey results and what they mean. In the meantime, we will continue our effort to introduce you to the tools you will soon use to develop software while simultaneously providing tips for the tools you are now using to develop software. And I, for one, will kick my bullet-list habit.
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