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Scott Hanselman did a survey of .NET usage and posted results on his blog. A few interesting notes:

1. Heavy use of older stuff: ASMX, DataSet, WebForms, Windows Forms
You'd be hard pressed to find new blog entries on it but it shows that older (tried) technologies don't sync up with what's popular. The last few projects I've worked on have had development cycles that far exceed the excitement of their underpinning technology. One needs to remember that excitement and hype aren't what make something useful, it's use. So the people who talk down DataSets do so in the face of what obviously works for a silent majority who are busy getting stuff done.

2. Some new stuff won't take, some new stuff takes off
The respondents using CardSpace and WorkFlow are dismal. I can match the "unscientific" survey with a lot of my own experience in the last few years and conclude it's within a broader trend. On the other hand, LINQ To SQL has very heavy use for something relatively new, almost on par with ADO DataSets which one could argue are in the same competitive space. That says to me that in some cases adoption is just slow when there's a "legacy" counterpart for a technology but in others, when the new technology is compelling, people take to it very quickly.

3. WinForms > WPF
More than twice the respondents but here's my conclusion: it's all about the toolset, not the technology. WPFs tools are not on par with their WinForms equivalents. The dual Blend + VS strategy doesn't make sense for a large majority of us who don't have full time designers we work with and the lack of built in controls (such as a DataGridView) mean as cool as rounded edges are, function trumps form when programming.

4. MVC?
Last I checked this was *just* released as a beta. More people claim to use that than WPF which seems to indicate a Hanselman type majority in respondents. Even if I wanted to jump into MVC, until it's at a "1.0" release I couldn't (and I'm wondering how others seem to be doing so) justify starting or migrating a major product to a product/framework that isn't yet complete.

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Comments

Justice~!
Actually, to be fair I've been using MVC on a bunch of projects lately some minor (conference booking application) and some major (massive government application). Frankly, at around preview 2-3 it was stable enough to build an app around even if I had to build some plumbing.

The major govt one is because we were looking to get ahead of the curve. Part of this is driven by me having control over technical determinations for most/all projs I am currently working on.
Tim
MVC likely is being driven by two things ... the Alt.NET movement and the fact that you have the source and can recompile for bug fixes if you need it. Makes having a "baked" product less important. Remember, for Open Source projects you get very little more than that in the way of promises and people use those technologies all the time.