Keyvan Nayyeri

Back in December 2007, Simone published an online survey about the usage of AJAX technologies among the .NET developers and after a short while, shared its interesting results with the community.

This year after completing our work on the book, he has updated his survey for 2009 with better organization and quality, and calls you to take a few minutes and answer to his short survey to help him extract some facts about the usage of AJAX technologies on the .NET community.

Simone started the survey a few days ago, but he has received a good number of responses from the audience (over 1000 responses), so he has published a quick report of the results on his blog. Like the first survey, there are very nice points in his report specifically in regards to the fact that this latter survey is taken only 1.5 years after the first one.

Apparently the advent of newer technologies specifically ASP.NET MVC 1.0 and its compatibility with popular jQuery library have influenced the usage of AJAX technologies and libraries on the .NET community, and there has been a substantial turning point in the usage of these two technologies among ASP.NET developers.

Another bold fact that can be extracted from a quick comparison between the two surveys is that the web development world has had a very fast progress in the area of AJAX development, and it’s one of the areas with most significant changes and innovations.

Last year I had written about my answers, so I do it for this year as well:

• I use AJAX both in development and production, and it’s a matter of a fact that AJAX interactions are a vital part of professional web development, so I wouldn’t expect a professional developer who doesn’t use such technologies.
• Since the arrival of ASP.NET MVC, I’ve been using it along with ASP.NET WebForms to build online web applications, and both technologies have worked fine for their own cases.
• For ASP.NET MVC, I use jQuery along with its plug-ins in conjunction with AJAX features available in ASP.NET MVC. But for ASP.NET WebForms, I still prefer to use ASP.NET AJAX and ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit as are. The main reason to prefer this combination is that for my WebForms projects I’m looking for a fast and straightforward method of development, and obviously ASP.NET AJAX and ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit are completely satisfactory for such projects.
• Specializing in ASP.NET AJAX and ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit, I also prefer to use them as are, without any modifications or manual processing for the exact same reason that I have to use them with ASP.NET WebForms.

In the end, I’d ask you to spend a few minutes and take the survey to help Simone get better results and share them with the community.