I recently emailed just over 9,000 people on the Krypton notification list asking if they would complete a quick online survey. A big thanks to the 940 that completed the survey and contributed the results detailed below. Given how busy people are these days I was pleased with such a good response rate.

It seems there are two C# coders for every VB.NET developer. This surprised me as I thought that the actual numbers would be about equal. Certainly no other language was of any significance in the survey. The ‘others’ included VB6, Foxpro, Delphi and Clarion# (whatever that might be). So continuing to provide all samples in C# seems to be the obvious conclusion.

It is now 7 months since the release of Visual Studio 2008 and it has reached parity with Visual Studio 2005. The next release of Krypton will not occur for several months and by then I would anticipate 2008 being the clear winner. So the next Krypton release will provide 2008 project and solutions files as the defaults but will also need to provide 2005 files for backward compatibility.

The ‘others’ included several indicating they used the express versions of Visual Studio and a couple of programmers using Borland C++ Builder. There was even one who claims to use notepad, but I hope that was just a joke!

We have all read the reports about Vista not exactly selling like hot cakes. So it is not surprising that Windows XP is the clear winner over Vista with developers. You have to imagine that developers are early adopters compared to the general public so that actual percentage of consumers using Vista must be lower than the 24% reported here. I wonder how many will skip Vista entirely and just move straight to Windows 7.

I asked this question to get a feel for how many developers were planning on moving away from WinForms and into WPF. With only 9% saying they are currently using WPF we can see that it has not been adopted anywhere nearly as quickly as Microsoft thought it would.

But if you add on the 17% and 14% that claim they will start using it within 6 months and a year then in theory a year from now it should be 40%. That would be major shift. It will be interesting to carry out the same survey next year and see if that shift really does materialise.

The Silverlight numbers are very similar to those for WPF which is not that surprising. Given they are both based on using XAML it would make sense that the same developers could shift to both WPF and Silverlight at the same time by using the same set of skills.

These results did surprise me as I expected the scroll bars to be a clear winner. I guess this is because a date time picker that is not consistent with the rest of the form looks more obvious. The ‘others’ section had a massive 129 individual answers that covered the entire range of possible controls anyone would ever need. I guess the best summary of the requests is they people want every control that comes with WinForms to be Kryptonized.

A grid control is the most requested feature. I did try to make a deal with 10Tec.com to license their grid control so I could Kryptonize it and release it as part of the Krypton Suite. This would have been ideal as it would have only taken a few weeks work but unfortunately 10Tec were not interested. Instead the second placed item, docking windows, is the next commercial component I will create once I get back from my upcoming holiday. The ‘others’ included requests for a wizard control and scheduling components.

No surprises on this one as Internet searching was always going to be the number one choice. I am pleased to see that forums/blogs are making a useful contribution. The only advert I have running is on the website of the popular Scott Hanselman blog. If you know of any other popular .NET blogs then let me know I might try and advertise on them as well.

I wasn’t sure if I should even ask this question. My thinking was that many people would answer ‘Expensive’ because they fear saying anything else would encourage the prices to be increased. Given this kind of bias I was not sure that the results would really reflect people’s opinion. Adding up the first three responses show that 88% believe the prices are fair or better. It shows I am not losing large numbers of sales because it is priced above its appropriate level. Don’t worry I have no plans on increasing the prices.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 2:50 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.