What do developers want?

Again, this should come as no surprise to anyone who has followed Microsoft's developer strategy in recent years. The .Net Framework, with its emphasis on managed code via the CLR (Common Language Runtime), represents the state of the art of Windows development and a marked improvement over the old approach. As reported previously, programmers who have taken the plunge have generally given it favorable marks.

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But support for C#, the flagship language of .Net, isn't unanimous. A purely object-oriented language designed to address perceived deficiencies of both Java and C++ and built from the ground up to run on the CLR, C# has often been characterized as Microsoft's "Java killer." Judging by our survey results, however, while C# is gaining traction, its success to date is modest.

Compared to last year, the number of respondents who report using C# in their projects increased 6 percent. Still, nearly twice as many survey participants say they are using Visual Basic than C#, which suggests that the majority of the growth in .Net adoption is coming from the installed Windows base, rather than defectors from the Java camps.

On the other hand, while Java remains our survey participants' top pick among programming languages, less than half of our respondents rank J2EE among their frameworks or APIs of choice. Presumably the rest of the Java developers prefer traditional APIs and non-J2EE servers, such as Apache Tomcat.

Integrating With XML

Still, while many developers remain cautious about adopting new technologies, this year's survey points to one clear winner: XML. When asked which technologies they expect their organizations to use more of in the next 12 months, a resounding 71 percent say they will increase use of the structured markup language.

XML goes hand-in-hand with Web services, so it follows that many survey participants also plan to invest in that area. Forty-one percent report they currently have projects underway involving SOAP, UDDI, WSDL, or WS-Security. Another 18 percent say they plan to begin using Web services technologies in the next 12 months.

But the same respondents seem more hesitant when it comes to committing fully to service-oriented architecture. Of those who have invested in SOA, most appear to be in the early pilot stages of development, with 25 percent reporting that they have begun an SOA initiative at the project or application level and 20 percent working at the department or regional level. Only 19 percent say they are currently working on an enterprisewide SOA initiative.

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These results are in keeping with the trend we saw last year, in which developers were cautious about buying into big-vendor hype and chose to focus on their existing competencies. Indeed, 61 percent of this year's respondents report that they only upgrade tools or frameworks when the change would solve a specific problem, while the number of respondents who say that they upgrade "rarely" jumped to 12 percent, versus only 4 percent last year.

Standing Their Ground

If any single conclusion can be drawn from this year's survey results, it's that IT organizations continue to place emphasis on integration and consolidation, rather than launching extensive new projects. But there is evidence this trend is changing.

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This year, 33 percent of survey respondents say they already have an enterprise application consolidation project underway in their organization, while only 9 percent say they have such an effort planned for the next 12 months and 7 percent are looking at the two-year timeframe.

Similarly, this is the year that many organizations plan to take charge of their legacy application infrastructure. The process of replacing mainframes is already underway for 26 percent of respondents, with another 24 percent busy enhancing their mainframe apps to fit into modern architectures. By comparison, only 5 percent have either project planned for the coming year.

Might this mean that the period of belt-tightening among enterprise developers is coming to an end? Will the next few years see a resurgence in organizations' willingness to invest in new initiatives, rather than merely sticking to their guns and maintaining old projects? The signs are encouraging, but only next year's survey results will tell.