The Developer Ecosystem in 2023: Key Trends for C#

Rachel Appel

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We’ve captured insights from 26,348 developers worldwide in our annual Developer Ecosystem Survey 2023. This recap focuses on C# and .NET, but you can see what’s trending in other languages as well. Enjoy the results and commentary, and let us know what you think!

Top Discoveries

We know that ASP.NET Core is the most used .NET framework by C# developers – 56% use it. But Blazor just simply hasn’t had the uptake that Microsoft was hoping for. Blazor Server is only 16% of the ASP.NET development landscape with Blazor WebAssembly at 12%. More developers use the Minimal API feature (20%), released after Blazor. So for full-stack and frontend development we’re at 64% of ASP.NET devs using MVC and 40% using Razor Pages.

While Aspire has just been released and is too new to be included in this survey, we’re keeping an eye on it to see what happens in the next year. Microsoft is going full force with the message “With .NET 8, every developer is a full stack developer (in the cloud)”.

Poornima Nayar

“APIs are everywhere and the fact that 78% voted for ASP.NET Core technologies proves that! Does this also mean that we are seeing a shift in the way applications are built? Looking at “Types of software being developed in Visual Studio and JetBrains Rider” it looks like websites are the most popular choice. So what other technologies and frameworks are being used for web applications? And what other types of applications are being developed that uses Web APIs?”

Poornima’s website

C# developers mostly run Windows and keep up to date.

This should come as no surprise: 79% of C# developers are using Windows, followed by 32% on MacOS and 19% on Linux. As new C# versions are released, there is steady adoption, as versions 11 and 10 are at 42% and 32%, respectively. As well, a smaller but significant number of legacy apps always stay behind, often for good reasons. Since 2017, C# developers who say “I’m not sure” about which version of C# they use have steadily grown in number.

Lou Creemers

“What a joy to notice that we as C# developers are staying up to date with the C# versions that we use. 74% on C# 10 or higher makes it possible to get the most out of language, not only behind closed doors but also in Open-Source projects.”

Lou’s website

C# developers build games, websites, utilities 

We looked at Rider and Visual Studio users developing in C#.

In the past year there’s been quite a boost in game developers working in Rider. Rider is a certainly favorite amongst Unity, Unreal Engine, and Godot developers. Meanwhile, the rest of the .NET ecosystem hasn’t had any drastic changes. Websites, utilities, and libraries still rule .NET, as .NET is firmly rooted in enterprise software.

IDEs, Editors, and Plugins

Visual Studio remains as the most popular IDE but 32% of Visual Studio users use ReSharper. 32% of C# devs use Rider, and 14% VSCode. Most of VSCode’s use comes from the C# plugins and .NET Tools. CoPilot is also popular among VSCode users – 25% said they use the plugin. 

Since it was announced late in the year, the results aren’t quite captured in this survey. Microsoft’s choice to retire Visual Studio for Mac means that most of the Visual Studio for Mac users have moved over to Rider.

1% of respondents say they don’t use any of the popular IDEs. They say “Other”. Are these the hard core Notepad folks? I knew they were out there somewhere!

Lou Creemers

Already 25% on GitHub Copilot. My guess would be that this percentage would even be higher if there weren’t company restrictions for many developers. This just shows how much AI is already integrated in our day-to-day work.”

Lou’s website

Unit Tests

At this point, what can one say? It’s not news, so let’s just face it. Every year the same phenomenon happens – there is a significant amount of developers who just don’t test. For those who do, xUnit and nUnit have maintained their spots as the top two choices.

Stefan Pölz

“It saddens me to see that the percentage of C# developers not writing unit tests has increased. But perhaps the recent versions of JetBrains tools can improve that figure with their superb suite of unit testing features.”

Stefan’s website

Profiling and diagnostics

Profiling is often left to roughly 20% of the people on development teams, and when asked about a third of those say it’s up to themselves or just a few teammates to do the profiling. As is such, profiling and diagnostics remain a bit of a specialty. Our tools are easy to use, but making sense of the data in the context of your application is the challenging part. 

Summary

There are several stable trend lines in .NET. One such trend is the ongoing adoption of new versions of C#. A first wave adopts, then more folks upgrade later. Unit testing, types of software developed, and profiling are also similar in number year over year. A noticeable trend is that as more .NET Framework and C# versions are released, more folks are unsure of their currently used C# version. 

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