What Developer Tweeps are Using for Their App Dev

Last week, I opened a very unscientific poll on Twitter asking what MS technologies developers were using to build their current in-progress applications. It was retweeted about within the Silverlight community, but also with broader reach folks like Scott Hanselman, Brad Abrams, and Phil Haack, as well as a few people in the Windows Forms community.

(Please note that I allowed for multiple choices, to account for hybrid or multi-faced applications and simultaneous multi-project development).

Considering the community of people who saw the RTs numbers somewhere in the 20k range, the sample size here is a bit small. However, you can still glean some interesting information from it.

One interesting little stati is compiled client code (WPF, Windows Forms, C++, Silverlight) vs. browser-based HTML/JavaScript (ignoring “other”):

• Code-on-Client: 386 votes
• HTML/JS: 404 votes - no, I didn’t make that up :)

That’s a pretty close split considering that Twitter leans more heavily towards people working in web development. I can almost guarantee that Windows Forms and WPF are underrepresented in those numbers, but even at almost 50% it shows that code-on-the-client is still a big force in business application development. Keep in mind as well that I didn’t ask about XNA. While a business app in XNA could be pretty cool, I figured those were few and far-between :)

I fully expect widespread adoption of Windows 7 (which is a very cool platform to develop for), as well as .NET 4 and the next version of Silverlight to make this an even more compelling story.