52% of application developers use .NET

A recent Evans Data study that tracks .NET usage shows a sharp increase in adoption. From spring 2003 to spring 2004, .NET development gained 6% among users. Today, 52% of those polled say they use .NET, up from 46% last year. What is more, 68% of those same respondents said they plan to develop applications using .NET by 2005, according to the report. In May 2004, Forrester Research released a report that found 56% of developers polled consider .NET their primary development environment for 2004, compared with 44% for J2EE. In certain verticals, the gap grows even wider; for example, 65% of developers working on public-sector projects said .NET was their primary platform vs. 35% for J2EE, while 64% of business-services developers led with .NET over 36% who led with J2EE. In VARBusiness survey, also completed in May 2004, 53% of solution providers polled reported developing a .NET application in the past year, and 66% said they planned to build one in the next 12 months.