European Developers Embrace C#, AJAX

Published: September 18, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Evans Data spends all of its time trying to figure out what developers are thinking. They ask what technologies developers like and dislike, what they are using and what they plan to use, and what other issues affect the application development cycle. The latest Evans Data poll of programmers in Europe shows that usage of C#, Microsoft's analog to Java for its .NET environment, and Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), are on the rise.

In its latest survey of developers in EMEA, Evans Data found that the usage of C# has increased among the shops it polls for its studies by 40 percent in the past year. Last year this time, 25.1 percent of programmers polled in EMEA survey said that they were using C# part of the time as they cranked out code for their employers; a year later, that figure has risen to 34.9 percent of those polled. But C# has a long way to go before it can be said to dominate European data centers and software development organizations.

"Microsoft was smart to have ECMA ratify C# early on, as that has helped the language find acceptance in Europe and consolidate its market share," says John Andrews, chief executive officer at Evans Data. "In addition, .NET has made significant inroads in the region and, of course, C# is the language that best reflects the CLI which is at the heart of .NET."

While 13.2 percent of developers polled said they use C# more than half the time, up 40 percent from the 9.4 percent level seen a year ago, clearly the vast majority programmers are using other tools more than half the time. And given the tendency for programmers to be cantankerous and to resist change, it is probably a safe bet that no particular programming language can be said to dominate the software development process.

Among European developers, just above half of the developers polled said that they are using .NET to deploy Web services, up slightly since last year. Some 40 percent of those polled said that they have extended or are working on extending applications on legacy host systems to new applications, and 65 percent of developers said that they are using or plan to use AJAX for some of their development.

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