State of .NET development almost three years after

Posted by: Fabrice Marguerie on November 03, 2004 @ 09:30 AM
Almost three years after .NET 1.0 has been released, and before .NET 2.0 appears, it looks like .NET reached a momentum.Projects based on the .NET platform are now common, the material available to developers is quite impressive, and the number of developers keeps growing.Let's take a look at where we are now, and see some numbers.Three years after its official release in 2002, it looks like .NET reached a momentum. Several statistics could be used as evidences.Let's just consider the number of books, articles, code samples, web sites or forums dedicated to .NET...A sign is the number of developers who join the .NET community keeps growing. Apparently, there are more than 2.5 million .NET developers world-wide.Showing how active the development sphere is, as of today more than 610 development tools, libraries and add-ins are referenced in the SharpToolbox.The most prospering categories are object/relational mapping products, all the other persistence and data-related tools, code generation, testing and profiling.Countless Integrated Development Environments (IDE) and add-ins for IDEs such as Visual Studio also exist.Language fanatics are not underprivileged, far from it with something like 70 programming languages compatible with .NET!The ability to target Linux with the release of Mono 1.0 this year is opening new horizons to .NET, without forgetting the various offerings for interoperability with other platforms or systems.Another indicator is the number of sites running ASP.NET. According to NetCraft, ASP.NET is currently on over 2.9 million active sites.After an important testing and validation phase, .NET becomes now widely adopted in enterprise. Numerous new developments are in progress, as well as heavy information systems migrations to the .NET platform.At first, companies were limiting themselves to a cautious adoption of the technology. But now .NET seems to be considered as valuable and as reliable as J2EE, and more than one enterprise uses both platforms at the same time.A lot has happened, but the future is still very promising. Next year will see the birth of .NET 2.0. In 2005 will also be released major products for .NET developers: Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 (with .NET CLR integration), for example.