Integrated Development Environment Usage Patterns Among Our Developers

We reference this survey in our launch events, so I wanted to provide you with the entire story for the chart that we display. Below is a summary and you can read the entire document here.

Forrester surveyed 703 application development professionals who subscribe to 1105 Media's .NET or Java newsletters and are actively involved in .NET or Java development to understand their integrated development environment (IDE) usage patterns and attitudes toward open source.

What did we learn?

Microsoft Visual Studio is the primary IDE of choice in the .NET group. In fact, at 97%, it's nearly a clean sweep. Open source alternatives to Visual Studio .NET are still immature, and express editions of Visual Studio are available for free.

While Eclipse is common, it won't become the only Java IDE in enterprise IT shops any time soon. Less than one out of five Java developers have a single primary Java IDE and no other.

Java developers use multiple IDSs, especially when compared to .NET developers. Eighty-nine percent of those who rely primarily on Eclipse also use at least one additional IDE.

Ease of use and platform support are very important to our developers: 66% and 62%, respectively, view these criteria as very important to their decision making process.