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!

But the punch line isn’t that MVC is really closed source — it’s that the headline a legitimate, non-April-Fool’s-joke news. I didn’t quite believe it until I went and grabbed the source code, but there it is. ASP.NET MVC is open source.

Guthrie didn’t explain why the move was made in his blog, but it’s consistent with Microsoft’s Web strategy. The company has already released several Silverlight components as open source, it’s working with Novell to develop an open source implementation of Silverlight, and it even worked with a company called Soyatec to put out a Silverlight development plug-in for Eclipse, the open source, Java-based IDE.

When I talked to the principle architect on Microsoft’s interoperability team about the latter, he said he sees open source purely as an interop strategy: “it hasn’t impacted Microsoft’s larger licensing models,” he told me. And yet, Microsoft seems to inch ever-closer to being a major player in the open source world.

The overall direction Microsoft seems to be taking is that the technologies higher up in the stack are candidates for open source, but its foundational technologies are still closed and proprietary. Microsoft’s MVC may be free, but you’ll need to run it on something; Microsoft is hoping you’ll pick Windows Server with ASP.NET 3.5 rather than an open source solution like Mono.

In other words: the idea is free, but the implementation will cost you.

One of the most well known cloud computing vendors is Amazon, which offers not just VMs but cloud-based storage and database services. Amazon’s SimpleDB uses XML to accept queries and spit back the result. There are also more integrated approaches. For instance, Salesforce.com lets developers write applications in its custom programming language Apex Code, which includes language constructs that hook into Salesforce.com’s database.

InfoWorld reviewed a few of these cloud-based databases in its examination of a new breed of simple, non-relational databases. Although the article didn’t look at Azure SQL Data Services (SDS) — they’re relational, and Azure isn’t even out yet — it did raise some questions that Microsoft shouldn’t ignore.
As InfoWorld sees it, the new breed of databases forego much of SQL’s data integrity patterns in favor of simpler query-response transactions. That may not be suitable for banks and other critical applications, but it’s just fine for many situations.

Since many of those non-critical applications are just the kind that companies might consider to try out Azure, Microsoft may be missing out on an opportunity by only providing full a full SQL database service in Azure. On the other hand, providing this sort of powerful service without a simpler database-ish offering could help drive home the message that Azure is intended for real, heavy, enterprise-level applications.

And of course, if programmers really want a simple, name-value, XML-based service, it won’t be hard to write one in Azure that uses SQL Data Services on the backend.

Most of the action was concentrated on the first day of MIX09: the biggest highlights were two new features in Blend Expression 3, SuperPreview and SketchFlow — but Silverlight 3 and Web App Installer also raised some eyebrows. On the other hand, the official launch of Internet Explorer 8 on Thursday was a bit anticlimactic.

SuperPreview is Microsoft’s answer to a problem that has dogged Web developers for about as long as they’ve been around: browser incompatibilities. SuperPreview lets designers see how two browsers render a given page by viewing the comparisons side by side or overlaid. The tool can also send HTML to a server and get the rendered image back, letting designers compare browsers that aren’t installed on their computers. That’s useful for comparing different versions of Internet Explorer, for instance, or even seeing how IE on Windows compares to Safari on a Mac.

Selecting a component in one browser preview highlights that component in the other browser’s rendering, letting developers quickly hone in one problem areas. But for now, SuperPreview only shows developers where the inconsistencies are; it doesn’t tell them how to fix the problems.

You can download SuperPreview as a standalone from Microsoft.

SketchFlow, the other new feature in Expression Blend 3, lets designers quickly prototype UIs by defining a flowchart that describes an application’s screens. You can also assign behaviors to buttons that can change a screen’s state or transition to another screen, giving clients a good sense of an application’s flow without you having to write any code.

One nice touch in SketchFlow is that Microsoft has included a new “wiggly” theme for controls that makes them look hand-drawn. That should help cut down on clients that don’t understand the difference between a prototype and a finished product: SketchFlow prototypes look more like drawings on digital napkins than software applications. On the other hand, SketchFlow projects are full-fledged Expression Blend applications, so you can use them as a starting point when you’re ready to write the real program.

So far, SketchFlow is see-don’t-touch: Microsoft had plenty of demonstrations throughout the week, but the bits aren’t shipping yet.

I’ve already talked about Silverlight 3 and the Web App Installer in my coverage of the MIX09 keynote, but they’re worth a quick mention here. Silverlight 3 includes lots of eye candy as well some important tools for developers. For instance, you’ll be able to write one data validation method that will run on both the client and the server. Microsoft also complemented the new Silverlight preview with improvements to the IIS Media Pack, including DVR-type pausing and playback of live streams.

The Web App Installer is a quick and easy way to deploy Web applications to your server, including applications not built on ASP.NET. The installer takes care of dependencies, so installing WordPress will automatically download and install PHP on your Windows server, too.

If there was one disappointment last week, it was the unveiling of Internet Explorer 8 on Thursday. It’s not so much that IE 8 is a bad browser — although it still lacks the extensibility that FireFox’s extensions provide — but the browser has already been in beta for months. The most exciting feature for designers is IE 8′s Developer Tools, which we’ve already seen. The buzz seems to be giving IE 8 the Vista treatment: blogs are calling its launch a failure and arguing that it hasn’t brought enough to the table to quell Firefox’s steady gain on the market.

First, the good news: IE8 is a major improvement over its predecessor. It’s faster, has plenty of handy features and comes with built-in developer tools. We covered IE8′s developer tools a few months ago, when it was still in beta; some of its new security features include recognizing malware sites and graying out all but the top level domain (TLD) in the URL bars, which will make it easier to notice phishing attacks. Chrome enthusiasts will be interested to learn that IE8 borrowed one of Chrome’s most compelling features: each tab is now a self-contained process, so a crash on one page won’t take down the whole browser.

The browser is also more compliant: Microsoft says it passes all of the 7201 tests it came up with and submitted to W3C, the body that sets Web standards.

But IE8 also has three new features called Slices, Accelerators and Visual Search. These enable sites to repackage themselves in interesting ways. For instances, IE8 sports a toolbar similar to the menu bar for Slices, which act as minature Web sites; clicking on one of these buttons shows its content, which can contain anything from news updates to an in-depth search field. It’s all very cool, and only IE8 supports it.

And that’s the kicker: Slices, Accelerators and Visual Search aren’t standards compliant, because IE8 is the only browser that supports them. Yes, they’re all based on standard XML; but that only takes you so far. That takes us to the real question: are the W3C’s standards the ones that count, or the de facto standards set by browsers?

The point of standards is to simplify development. HTML, CSS, JavaScript and the rest should be “write once, run anywhere,” to borrow Java’s infamous mantra. The best way to do that is to agree on the standards and then write software to match them: Microsoft has done that for CSS, but its unilateral introduction of Slices, Accelerators and Visual Search show that realpolitik is still very much alive in the browser wars.

My guess is that browsers will never be fully compliant, and that’s a good thing. If each browser were really compliant — if it rendered the standards perfectly and nothing else — there’d be very little room for experimentation and progress. Any competition between browsers would be solely on speed, security and stability. Those are all great goals, of course, but it’s also nice that browsers are looking for ways to push the envelope.

What’s important is that we go back every once in a while, see what’s worked, and standardize it before moving forward again. And that’s what Microsoft has done with IE8.

Of course, the question of trusting an outside party with your applications and data isn’t a problem unique to Microsoft: Salesforce.com and Google Apps face the same hurdles in enterprises. But I’m not sure how much of a consolation it is for any company to know that its whole industry, and not just it alone, is having a hard time.

Meanwhile, the recession may be taking its toll on Microsoft’s standard server market. A study from IDC found that companies are increasingly turning to Linux in an effort to save money. Many of those Linux servers will come at the expense of Unix rather than Windows, but the trend should still be a worrisome reminder that glitzy new Web 2.0 platforms are only going to go so far in this economy.

When Microsoft showed off VSTS 2010 at PDC, one of the first questions from the audience was about pricing. The developer said that while VSTS’s features looked great, the tools were just too expensive for his team. I wonder how many companies will come to the same conclusion when Microsoft urges them to rewrite their applications to work on Azure. Service blackouts won’t help Microsoft’s case.

The problem remains unsolved, but one approach Microsoft is trying is a new technology called Web Sandbox, which it announced at PDC. The Web Sandbox is a server-side program that retrieves outside scripts, transforms them to make them secure and embeds them directly to the HTML. You can see Isaccs’ complete talk explaining how to use Web Sandbox on Channel 9.

Which brings us to today’s news: Web Sandbox is now being released as open source, under the Apache License 2.0. What’s interesting here isn’t just that Microsoft is continuing its overtures into OSS, but that it’s continuing to do so primarily on the Web front. Two of its other major flirtations with open source have been its support of jQuery and its release of the code for its business-oriented Silverlight controls.

I don’t think anybody is accusing Microsoft of being altruistic, so I won’t bother making the case that this is an obvious example of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” But it seems to me that Microsoft’s open source strategy hinges on being open on the Web and sticking with proprietary software everywhere else. Pricing for Windows 7 hasn’t been released yet, but I’m guessing it’ll cost more than Ubuntu.

That two-pronged approach makes a lot of sense. The Internet has always been free to use, and if people aren’t going to pay for your software, you may as well give away the source. Desktops and enterprise apps, on the other hand, still provide major sources of income for software vendors.

For Microsoft to stay relevant as a software company, it has to continue to attract top developers, both to itself and to the ISVs who develop for Windows. Playing nice with OSS on the Web may help Microsoft keep up with the cool new upstarts so that it can continue to make money where there’s money to be made.

The inauguration will be the biggest event that we know of to be broadcast using Silverlight 2 since it came out of beta in October. This announcement is good news for Microsoft, given that MLB announced in November that it would be switching from Silverlight back to Adobe Flash.

Microsoft executives have donated heavily to the inauguration: Bill Gates and Steve Balmer each gave $50,000 for the event, and other executives also donated five-figure sums. Microsoft also donated to the Obama campaign heavily during the election, giving it $2,124,186 — over twice what it gave to the McCain campaign, according to opensecrets.org. Most of that money came from individuals, so it doesn’t look like the company overtly bought what will likely turn out to be a huge surge in Silverlight downloads. But with Adobe not even appearing on opensecrets.org‘s “heavy hitters” list, I can’t help but wonder if Microsoft’s generosity helped it get this event.

Windows Azure is meant to be another tier of computing, addressing Web development in the same respect that Vista and Windows Server address client-side and server-side development, said Ray Ozzie, the company’s chief software architect.

For now, Windows Azure is in very early beta. Its functionalities are fairly limited, and the company has not rolled it out to the public at large yet; for now, only developers at PDC will get activation codes. Ozzie warned that when the service reaches a commercial release — at a yet-unnamed time — it will likely be very different, and possibly incompatible, with  the current version.

Developers looking for client-side news were out of luck today; the whole keynote focused on Azure, with plenty of demos to show what the cloud OS can do so far (though not a whole lot on how that’s different from what standard client-server apps already do). Tomorrow’s keynote will focus on client-side Windows development; check here for more updates.

According to John, in his article on MSDN Magazine Web, the business logic, entity model, and data-mapping code can be consumed by any presentation tier. 

He’s created the WCF services to be consumed by a Silverlight 2 app, set up the server hosting the WCF services to allow cross-domain invocation, and more. 

Silverlight 2 UI communicates through Silverlight – MSDN Magazine Web