A preliminary look at the survey reveals that 87% are using Visual Studio 2008 or 2005. About 65% of respondents use one of those versions as their primary IDE.

.NET languages are very popular; legacy code also important

Three quarters of all respondents reported using one of the two main .NET languages, C# and VB.NET; for half of respondents, one of those languages is what they do most of their coding in. C# is the more popular language by a significant (but not overwhelming) margin of 48% to 38%. Legacy code is still important, though. One fifth of readers use C++ and almost a third use VB6 or earlier, although only 15% of all respondents use those older languages as their main programming language.

Interestingly, the “use at all” to “use as primary” stats aren’t symmetric within .NET. As I noted above, 48% of readers use C# and 38% use VB.NET. But while 36% of readers use C# as their primary coding language, only 17% use VB.NET as their primary. That means that 75% of respondents who use C# do so for most of their programming (36 / 48 = .75), but only 45% of VB.NET coders use that language as their primary.

Web development is huge, but not quite cutting edge

Unsurprisingly, Web development is very popular. Just over half of all SearchWinDevelopment.com readers work with ASP.NET. For most of those, Web development is their main responsibility. But despite the Web 2.0 craze, Silverlight isn’t nearly as popular.

Ajax development is strong, but relatively diverse. That is probably due in part to Microsoft changing strategies: although it has its own Ajax framework, the company recently decided to officially back the popular library jQuery and incorporate it into IntelliSense. About 30% of ASP.NET developers use ASP.NET AJAX, 23% use jQuery and 15% use another framework.

What you’re doing, and how you’re doing it

In case you’re wondering how other Windows developers get things done, the top four most popular programming methodologies are waterfall, extreme programming (XP), Agile and Scrum. But about a quarter of you aren’t employing any methodology at all! That could be because almost a third of respondents work in an environment with fewer than five programmers, but it’s still a bit surprising.

And as for what you’re doing, the majority of our survey respondents said that improving performance one of their architectural challenges. That’s to be expected, but what stands out is that that’s the only architectural challenge that a majority of our readers are facing. Almost 60% of our readers listed performance as a challenge their company is facing; the next popular choice, implementing a workflow, weighed in at about 42%.

Those are topics we haven’t covered extremely closely, so that feedback is great to have.

Lastly, it’s clear that many of you are interested in learning new tools and technologies. We asked readers to rank their interest in nine topics, including software-as-a-service and open source software, which Microsoft is warming up to. Most of the topics trended toward “highly interested,” with only scripting languages and grid computing technology trending toward disinterest. That might not bode well for Microsoft’s latest push to promote PHP on Azure.

Look for a more in-depth analysis of the survey in the coming weeks. In the meanwhile, to all of our readers who took the survey, our deep thanks!

What came first?

Iterating through a collection with a for-each construct has been around for a long time.  .Net has the capability and in the beginning it was the recommended way of looping through a collections of widgets to find something or count something.  The basic construct is:

        private int CountForEach()
        {
            int count = 0;
            foreach (DLDog Dog in Dogs)
            {
                if (Dog.FoodBrand == "Purina" )
                {
                    count++;
                }
            }
            return count;
        }

Nothing too earth shattering about this.  Assuming we have a collection of 10 dogs and 3 of them use “Purina”, we will return a count of 3.

How would Generics and Anonymous methods change this syntax?  In the .Net 2.0 framework we can simplify the previous code a little as follows:

        private int CountGenericDelegate()
        {
            MyActionCount = 0;
            Dogs.ForEach(MyAction);
            return MyActionCount;
        }

This is a little misleading because we still need to write the delegate method “MyAction” but it does give us some flexibility in that we can pass any method to the ForEach generic method that adheres to the Action<T> prototype which is a predefined delegate in .Net 2.0.  Here is what the MyAction needs to look like in this example:

        private void MyAction(DLDog Dog)
        {
            if (Dog.FoodBrand == "Purina" )
            {
                MyActionCount++;
            }
        }

Another predefined delegate is the Predicate<T> delegate.  This one returns a Boolean based on some condition.  The <T> is typically your List<T> type.  Here is an example that uses the Predicate<T>:

        private List<DLDog> QueryDelegate()
        {
            return Dogs.FindAll(ByTypeAndCost);
        }
        // Predicate<T> typed method for FindAll
        bool ByTypeAndCost(DLDog Dog)
        {
            if (Dog.DogType == "German Sheperd" && Dog.AnnualVet > 1500M)
                return true;
            else
                return false;
        }


Enter .NET 3.5 – SWEEEET!

In .NET 3.5 Microsoft pulled all punches and really exploited the power of delegates, generics, and anonymous methods.  Building on that technology they added extension methods, lambda, and LINQ to the system.  Now our first count example can be simplified as:

        private int CountLambda()
        {
            MyActionCount = 0;
            return Dogs.Count(n => n.FoodBrand == "Purina" );
        }

This syntax is foreign as you can see but after a short explanation it will become very natural.  The “=>” operator is loosely defined as “Goes To”.  Under the covers – the compiler is doing this:

        private int CountLambda()
        {
            this.MyActionCount = 0;
            return this.Dogs.Count<DLDog>(delegate(DLDog n)
            {
                return (n.FoodBrand == "Purina" );
            });
        }

Previous code sample courtesy of “Reflector“…

Lambda is nothing more than syntactic sugar for inline anonymous methods and the .Count method on a generic list is nothing more than an extension method provided by the .Net 3.5 framework to the .Net 2.0′s generic list class.  No smoke and mirrors here!

Now LINQ is another animal but simply exploits everything up to this point and the previous example looks like:

        private int CountLinq()
        {
            var query = from dog in Dogs select dog;
            return query.Count(n => n.FoodBrand == "Purina" );
        }

The query variable is of type IEnumerable<T> and the T in this case is a DLDog object.  The compiler ends up with the following:

        private int CountLinq()
        {
            return this.Dogs.Select<DLDog, DLDog>(
                delegate(DLDog dog)
                {
                    return dog;
                }).Count<DLDog>(
                delegate(DLDog n)
                {
                    return (n.FoodBrand == "Purina" );
                }
                );
        }

Notice the use of the .Select extension method.  The method is defined as:

      public static IEnumerable<TResult> Select<TSource, TResult>(
            this IEnumerable<TSource> source,
            Func<TSource, TResult> selector)

(In the Visual Studio help system… )

So in summary – LINQ is really syntactic sugar for the extension methods provided by the .NET 3.5 framework!  Simple! 
…and SWEEEET!

Send me an email if you want a copy of the source code used for this article.

Also of note:

*The new .NET Framework Client Profile Setup Package which provides a setup installer that enables a simpler installation for .NET client applications on machines that do not already have the .NET Framework installed. According to Microsoft’s Guthrie, the .NET Framework Client Profile setup contains just those assemblies and files in the .NET Framework that are typically used for client application scenarios;

*WPF data binding and editing improvements that include: StringFormat support within {{ Binding }} expressions to enable easy formatting of bound values and better handling and conversion support for null values in editable controls;

*Better Intellisense support within VS 2008 for popular Javascript libraries such as JQuery, Prototype, Scriptaculous, and ExtJS; and

*Visual Web Developer Express now comes with the SQL Server 2008 Express Beta.

It is fair to say that the first rush of .NET technology was about catching up with Java, although there was much unique about .NET too. With LINQ, for now, it seems Microsoft has stolen a march on the Java opposition.

I spoke recently with Jason Beres, director of product management at Infragistics, which is one of the major third-parties in the Microsoft market. Beres said people will take LINQ very seriously. “I think it going to be the de facto way to do any real data binding or object access moving forward,” he said.

With the new Microsoft tool kit comes Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Is WPF game changing? That is hard to say. When it was first conceived, the ubiquitous Web interface seemed to be overstressed, and ready to be replaced by a new generation of WPF-based Smart Clients that would use something like WPF. But, before WPF made it too market, AJAX came on strong as a means to give new life to Web interfaces.

This means the plate of companies like Infragistics is pretty full. Infragistics has just rolled out NetAdvantage for WPF 2007, which is compatible with Visual Studio 2008. At the same time, according to Beres, the company has been re-tooling its frameworks around ASP.NET AJAX as well.

For Infragistics and others, Silverlight looms as another alternative interface. Watch for Infragistics and others to provide Silverlight components, especially now that Silverlight 2.0 (which, more than its predecessor, rightly bears the mantle of “WPF/Everywhere”) arrives in its first beta form.

LINQ, WPF and VS 2008 have been primary areas-of-interest for the SearchWindowsDevelopment.com site for some time. We invite you to check out our LINQ VS 2008 pages, and to stay tuned.

RELATED INFORMATION:
> VS 2008 and LINQ Topic Page
> Introducing WPF
> Introduction to Silverlight 1.0

However, when you use Visual Studio 2008, you will not find this template in the New Web site creation templates.  The reason for this is that  Visual Studio 2008, by default creates a .NET Framework 3.5 application.  See the .NET Framework type at the top right section of the window image below.

AJAX is now integrated into the framework.  In Visual Studio 2008 all web sites that are created using .NET Framework 3.5 are AJAX enabled.  You don’t have to create a separate AJAX enabled web pages.

The Stanford visit is one of many he’s made in recent years to drum up added interest in computer science among students. 

Programming seems less and less to be a career of choice, and this worries Gates. So he goes to colleges and addresses the students frankly about why he loves software.

It is not all together unlike his speeches to certified geeks. There is plenty of ‘neat’ stuff, ‘really cool’ stuff, and the funny video. But I’d recommend the Stanford transcript as a good entry point to a view on the state of computing today and over time.

Gates glosses over a few facts – there were, for example, software businesses before Microsoft. But he is right in saying his company was the major one to take the low cost-high volume approach to business software.

He discussed a dream ”required some heroic assumptions. ”

We had to believe that the cost of the hardware would come down. We had to believe that the volume would go up. And only then would the economics of being able to spend tens of millions of dollars to write a software package, and yet being able to sell it for say $100 or less, actually make sense.

Much software today is free. Microsoft does not mind that, if it is free too students who will go on to do way cool things, including perhaps becoming a Windows developer some day. At the same time Gates spoke at Stanford, the company announced its DreamSparks free software program, which Ed Tittel recently wrote about in ”Microsoft sparks creativity with DreamSpark student developer program” on SearchWinDevelopment.com.

In Visual Studio there are two types of Web Forms available – Web Form and the Web Content Form. 

The Web Form is a standard Web Form – without the Master page, with its HTML code like a standard HTML page.  Whereas, the Web Content Form is the one to which you can attach a Master page.

The Web Form page also has a MasterPageFile property.  But, if you create a Web Form and then set the MasterPageFile property to link to your Master page you will get a run time error.

Content controls have to be top-level controls in a content page or a nested master page that references a master page.

This is because content pages must not have another other HTML tags or controls. 

If you want to use Master Pages use Web Content Form, otherwise use the Web Form.

Another nice feature in Visual Studio 2008 – is that in that in the top right corner of the Design window of the Web content page is a link to the Master page that this page is linked to.  Also, the “Split” view is cool.. you can now see the source and the design view tiled in the design area.

Well, Visual Studio 2008 went to its final debutante ball last week. The event was held in Los Angeles, and it was entitled ”Heroes Happen Here.” As Microsoft hoped, VS 2008 was rolled out along with Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 (which, admittedly, is still something of a ‘player to be named later,’ as all of its parts did not get into the box on time for the Heroes launch.)

”With the launch of Visual Studio 2008,”  CEO Steve Ballmer told the Heroes crowd, ”you’ll see performance again ramp up dramatically as we improve compiler speeds and developer productivity really quite dramatically. Start times, load times, compile times are all quite dramatically improved with this launch of Visual Studio 2008.”

After a long journey the tool once code-named Orca is out as Visual Studio 2008. For some of us, the move from code name to product name is anti-climactic. For many more of us, the real game is just about to begin.

To get a gauge of where things are headed, correspondent Coleen Frye spoke to Visual Studio 2008 users, and her work is on display on SearchWinDevelopment.com. In ”A view on VS 2008, ” a development manager at a cutting-edge Internet agency tells Frye that improvements to Team Foundation Server are among the keys that led the firm to take the VS2008 plunge. So, Ballmer’s boast of load and compile time improvements may be sound.

SearchWinDevelopment.com has been following Orca elements for a while. A clear area of interest has been LINQ, which spans both VB and C#. Check out the LINQ Learning Guide to get up to speed on this new way of working with data programmatically.

A slew of Visual Studio 2008 tips and tutorials is available as well in the site’s Visual Studio 2008 Learning Guide.

Before you go looking for replacement add-ins, though, you might want to check out a recent blog post by Mohamed Ahmed Meligy called Tip: Try this to make a VS 2005 add-in work with VS 2008. As the title implies, the author discovered a quick process for making sure that his Visual Studio 2005 add-ins would work on the newer version of the IDE.

The caveat here, of which Meligy is quite aware, is that this process may not work with all Visual Studio 2005 add-ins. Nonetheless, it certainly can’t hurt to try it out, especially if you have come to rely on a particular add-in so much that you think it’s part of the IDE itself.

The other day I got the latest edition of Visual Studio magazine in the mail. Along with it came a glossy, full-color pirate’s map. Evidently, that’s how Microsoft thinks of Visual Studio 2008 — “made for the likes of developers, and other scoundrels.”

I know the calendar says 2008, but in the real world of developers, it’s barely 2005. And I’m more a captain of a leaky little fishing boat than I am a pirate. It takes everything I have to get my work out the door on time. I upgrade my tools (such as Visual Studio) when I can’t live without a new feature, not when I get glossy maps in the mail.

I’m not alone: I still see plaintive questions begging for help with VB 6 apps, and with upgrading to VB .NET. I’ll leave it to others to reveal all the cool new stuff in VS 2008. I’m going to concentrate on Visual Studio 2005, including the woes of upgrading from VS 2003.

Whenever I run across a juicy bit, I’ll let you know. These are the things they never tell you, the information that’s written between the lines in the documentation, the stuff they leave out. It’s the stuff you find after opening a hundred Google links, buried in the answer to the answer to the answer to a question on some obscure site.

Who is this “they” who never tells me stuff? I’ll leave it up to you to decide.

I program mostly in Visual Basic .NET, so that’s what I’ll be talking about. I work almost exclusively with WinForms, and I’ve done a lot of work using Access, Word, and Excel in .NET apps. I love to write macros to make my life easier. I am a consultant with clients in Florida, Massachusetts and Maine. Just to keep things interesting, I live across country from all of them, in Washington State. So I might throw in some tidbits about telecommuting and consulting. Let me know if you are interested.

I’m sure I’ll write about some things you already know. Maybe they’ll make you smack your head and exclaim, “What sort of idiot is she?” But I figure if it wasn’t obvious to me, it wasn’t obvious to someone else, and that’s who the tidbit is for. I’m glad you have a better grasp of some things than I do.

But they could have told me.