Results from our .NET and Windows Developer Community Survey

8 Dec 2022

Every year we survey our community for roadmap ideas and to gain insights into the state of the .net Windows and cross-platform developer ecosystem. While we often ask new questions, we also repeat some of the questions to understand year-over-year trends.

We were interested in target platform preferences and the most preferred IDEs developers in the Microsoft ecosystem, as this information helps prioritize our work for our open-source project.

Summary

Windows as a target platform has gained importance at ‘the expense’ of macOS and Linux. Also, it took over Android as the most important target platform.
Web has retained its priority in developers’ minds.
Android is more popular on mobile platforms than iOS by a 15% margin.
Visual Studio still commands most of the market at 80%. But if developers could hypothetically use just one IDE, VS Code could get even more popular with this audience if it could gain some IDE-like features.

The most important targets for Xplat development

Looking at it from year-over-year patterns, from top-3 platforms, we see the same platforms, albeit with some changes in popularity:

Windows: 77% in 2022 vs. 67% in 2021
Android: 72% vs. 69% in 2021
Web: 64% in both 2022 and 2021

It is also worth noting that macOS dropped from 36% to 28%, and Linux dropped from 31% to 26% year-over-year when looking at the ‘must run on’ platforms. Coincidentally this drop seems to correspond with the spike Windows received.

In mobile world on its own, Android rose from 69% to 72% in 2022, while iOS dipped slightly from 58% to 57% in 2022, a 15% difference in Android favor.

All that said, the way this question was asked was changed compared to last year’s survey, so we take these results lightly.

Most preferred IDEs for .NET and Windows Developers

It won’t be a surprise that Visual Studio is the most dominant IDE for our audience, with 80% of the respondents selecting it as the most important IDE for them. Also, VS Code is firmly in the #2 spot. We often hear this; developers use Visual Studio and VS Code side by side.

When a weighted average is taken (a lower number is better – as in, more important), the differences are very small year-over-year, certainly within the statistical error of the survey. That said, it is worth noting that all three Microsoft offerings slightly decreased in importance, while JetBrains Rider’s only trending towards more importance.

Weighted Average chart:

	2021	2022
Visual Studio	1.29	1.30
Visual Studio for Mac	3.11	3.26
Visual Studio Code	2.22	2.42
JetBrains Rider	3.25	3.23

The #2 spot for VS Code claim was further confirmed by asking developers to hypothetically chose ONLY ONE IDE they could use for their development. We introduced this hypothetical question in 2022 to see preferences. Looking at the results below, a portion of Visual Studio developers (Windows and Mac) could be willing to use VS Code as their only tool if it had some additional IDE-like features they needed.

In Conclusion

We tried not to introduce bias into the survey by using only one medium – it was distributed via all channels we use to communicate with our audience – GitHub, Twitter, discord, and email. We believe it accurately represents how the Uno Platform audience feels about trends in cross-platform development. While we can’t use all the channels Microsoft would have because the survey was re-shared by many influencers in .net and the Windows dev world, we believe these results are likely simiilar to what a study by Microsoft would uncover. Still, we want to acknowledge the bias we have.

That said, trends are important and relevant. Whatever bias we introduce by being an option for C# and XAML developers to take their apps to all desktops, mobile or web platforms, that bias remained consistent. This year we had 220 survey takers and last year 280, both pretty decent number of respondents to be able to draw conclusions on trends with our community.

About Uno Platform

For those new to Uno Platform, it allows for creating pixel-perfect, single-source C# and XAML apps that run natively on Windows, iOS, Android, macOS, Linux, and Web via WebAssembly. It offers Figma integration for design-development handoff and extensions to bootstrap your projects. Uno Platform is free, open-source (Apache 2.0), and available on GitHub.

Next Steps

If you’d like to be included in further surveys by the Uno Platform team, please subscribe to our newsletter or star us on GitHub so you get notified when next year’s survey gets published.

And, of course, while we have your attention, if you’d like to try our open-source platform, you can use this 5-minute tutorial. We’d appreciate you try it and give us feedback on GitHub.