Results for Ajax usage among .NET developers
Simone Chiaretta recently posted the results to his Ajax usage survey.
Check out the: .NET Ajax Survey results
Simone has a great write up, including the raw data, I encourage you to check it out... But A couple of things that popped out to me:
1. Simone concludes that 84% of ASP.NET developers are using ASP.NET AJAX... That is an amazingly high percentage... I am excited that we could help that large a percentage of developers!
2. I am a bit surprised that only about ~50% of developers are using the AJAX Control Toolkit. I'd love to hear your thoughts on using the toolkit? Do you think it is a naming thing (people don't get the difference between ASP.NET AJAX and the AJAX toolkit?) or maybe it has to do with the heavy update panel usage, or are the factors that prevent developers from using the toolkit? Any theories?
3. Apparently, UpdatePanel kicks butt! 91.8% of ASP.NET AJAX users are using UpdatePanel. Personally, I love this feature as well. It gives you Ajax style of interactivity for your application without writing client side Ajax code!
4. Last but not least, I am absolutely amazed at the high early uptake of the ASP.NET MVC Framework. We are just a couple of weeks into our first public CTP and already 2.3% of folks said they are using it! That is way higher than i'd expect so early on. What is more, is that his a much higher percentage than any of the other, much more mature, MVC frameworks.
Comments
Anonymous
December 21, 2007
PingBack from http://geeklectures.info/2007/12/21/results-for-ajax-usage-among-net-developers/Anonymous
December 21, 2007
Count me in that group that doesn't like the control toolkit. For starters, it just doesn't feel like an MS product (was it written by community contributions?), has pretty terrible documentation, IMO (MSDN is pretty good with its own faults, but control toolkit stuff is more of a "Look at this example and figure the rest out yourself", mixes too much client-side stuff in with the AJAX (outside recording drop position, what does dragging a window around need async callbacks for? If you have some great javascript-based controls to write, release a separate toolkit...or better yet make the former an extension of the latter). And (finally?) when those controls don't act right (typical for a 1.0), they are EXTREMELY difficult to debug...I'm talking going through every window in the Script Explorer to drop breakpoints all over JS and cross fingers that the call stack doesn't lead to you a delegate call.Anonymous
December 21, 2007
OK, I was wrong about the "finally" part, as it hit me what the control toolkit reminds me of: the MS P&P "Enterprise" Library. I see that thing used way too much with the idea that because MS puts it out, it has to be good for .Net, when in reality, it's not quite ready for primetime and is almost as much of a disappointment to integrate with as 3rd party libraries (although if I was on an island and I had to pick either to stare at for the rest of my life, it'd be the AJAX control toolkit)(Anonymous
December 21, 2007
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December 21, 2007
Like all surveys this isn't truely representitive of the entire market but simple of those that came across his blog. The sort of people who read his blog (and DotNetKicks where it got exposure) are those people actively seeking information and new ways of doing things. If you managed to survey those people who don't read DNK I think you'd find those figures much much lower. [)amienAnonymous
December 21, 2007
I jumped on the Ajax bandwagon (professionally) 9 months ago and haven't looked back. I started using the control toolkit and was really excited about it (the videos where a great help), but then I chose to use telerik RadControls, which at the time did not work with the toolkit. Now "upgrading" to the Prometheus versions I expect to start using the toolkit again, as this is based on MS ASP.NET Ajax :-) Great stuff! Really helps impress the bigwigs in my company! Thanks.Anonymous
December 21, 2007
Actually half of the people came also from this blog. Again, something that Brad didn't mention is that Ajax is used by 69% of the devs in a production environment, 61% in devs and 23% in a prototype product. In response to Al, I bet these 69% is mainly in private, intranet-only web applications, not public websites.Anonymous
December 22, 2007
I like the concept of the toolkit and want to use the controls, but it feels "half-baked" and I have had many issues with implementations. I wish this was a MSFT feature and that it was more integrated with VS, etc.Anonymous
December 22, 2007
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December 23, 2007
I agree with Malcolm and others concerning the toolkit about just not feeling right. I have tried 3-4 controls from the toolkit initially and never could get them to work "just right". After standing back and looking at the time I spent trying to get them to work, I opted to remove them all together and will wait for the next "version" that will be a bit more optimized hopefully. They seemed to have a slow response time on the final product and had several people comment on that they would just rather go back to the old way of postbacks. Granted it was only a couple of people but I noticed it as well. I took the survey and I usually don't post comments about anything but felt compelled to add my .02. I do use AJAX in certain parts of our applications but only in certain places where it seems beneficial. Over time I do see using it more but right now, it's a slow integration process to see what reaction we get from our customers. Thanks.Anonymous
December 24, 2007
I am floored by the percentage of people using the UpdatePanel control. (Although we don't know who replied to the survey, etc.) We used it all the time in the ajax pages until we realized what kind of beast it is and how it works. It is like shoving ajax down the asp.net page model throat. So now it is all ajax calls to web service with update panel removed. Works great.Anonymous
December 24, 2007
The name of the Ajax Toolkit library itself could be misleading, BUT it's too heavy and not robust. GridView support is not perfect. Now it looks nice to play but hard to use.Anonymous
December 26, 2007
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