CodeClimber

Two frameworks are better than one

Simone Chiaretta — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 16:48:31 GMT

Looking deeper into the raw data of the survey about Ajax adoption among .NET developers I found some interesting figures that show a probably different mindset you get when you start working with ASP.NET MVC.

Let’s see the following table, that show the percentage of developers that use jQuery vs the MS Ajax Stack based on which web UI framework they are using.

	MVC only (7,8%)	WebForms only (62%)	Both (25%)
jQuery	83%	60%	90%
ASP.NET Ajax	13%	46%	13%
ACT	11%	65%	16%

Let me try to understand what a possible story behind that numbers might be:

John Developer, was working with WebForms, and was using mainly the Ajax Control Toolkit and sometimes ASP.NET Ajax. Then John read about ASP.NET MVC and started using it. He also discovered jQuery, and used it to write the Ajax part of his applications, also together with ASP.NET Ajax and the ACT. After a few happy month of ASP.NET MVC, he had to go back to WebForms development, but instead of sticking to ASP.NET Ajax and the ACT, he started using the new tools and concepts he discovered during the previous month. And that includes jQuery.

The interesting figure here is that developers that use both ASP.NET MVC and WebForms acquire a mindset that make them choose the better tool for each task, instead of sticking only to the same “hammer”. The use jQuery, but also use the Ajax Control Toolkit when it’s needed to. And I guess this not only applies to javascript frameworks, but also to the other concepts, patterns and principles.

And that is another point in favor to learning ASP.NET MVC if you haven’t already, and, if for some kind of imposition from someone higher in the management stair, you can’t use it in real project, apply the concept you learnt back to your webforms development.

What do you think? Am I drawing the correct conclusions from these figures?

Tags: aspnetmvc,ajax,jQuery,webforms

Ajax survey 2009: jQuery and MS Ajax are almost tied among .NET developers

Simone Chiaretta — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:39:25 GMT

Almost one month ago I created a survey in order to try and understand how .NET developers are using Ajax. And also to compare it with the results I collected at the end of 2007.

I left the survey running a few weeks and once I received around 2500 responses I closed it: but without further ado let’s have a look at the results, and later I’ll do a more in depth analysis of the data collected.

The results

The most used Ajax/JS library among .NET developers is jQuery, which is used by the 71,4% of the users. Second comes the Ajax Control Toolkit with 58,8%, followed by the core ASP.NET Ajax library, which is used by 44,8%.

The 3 most used libraries are still the same of 2007, just with the opposite order (it was ASP.NET Ajax, the Control Toolkit and then jQuery).

Looking at the results of the question about which Web framework you are using, the results shows that quite a few users are starting to adopt ASP.NET MVC for building they applications: 87% are using WebForms and 32% are using ASP.NET MVC.

The other interesting question was about the adoption of the technology, and 77% of the developer that responded say they are using it in production, 70% in development stage, but is astonishing to me is that 8,3% is not using it at all, or just using in personal tests, not related to their jobs. This looks more astonishing since 2 years ago this percentage was lower (it was just 5%).

ASP.NET Ajax and the Ajax Control Toolkit

Time for more analysis: it seems strange to me that there are more people claiming they are using the control toolkit and not using ASP.NET Ajax (probably some didn’t realize one is just an abstraction over the other), so I digged into the results a bit more and I found out that the percentage of people that are using either ASP.NET Ajax or the Ajax Control Toolkit is 73% of the population. This means that jQuery and the Microsoft Ajax stack are pretty much on the same market share: 71% of jQuery vs 73% of MS Ajax.

What changed since 2007?

As you saw in the previous sections, not much: jQuery gained a lot of attention (probably due to the official endorsement of Microsoft) and all the rest remained pretty much the same. Some libraries gained a few points, like JSON.NET, and others, like Prototype and Scrit.aculo.us, lost a few. And, despite becoming a dormant project, AJAX.NET Professional lost only 3% of the users.

The first chart from the left (click to enlarge) shows the big gain of jQuery (in blue), the slight increase in the Ajax Control Toolkit (red) and the drop in the usage of the core ASP.NET Ajax library (in green). All of this combined lead to final result of having jQuery and the Ajax Microsoft stack with more or less the same usage (second image from the left).

WebForms vs ASP.NET MVC users

Which library is preferred by developers using WebForms? And which by developers that use ASP.NET MVC?

Nothing new here: the 804 developers that checked ASP.NET MVC prefer jQuery (88%) over MS Ajax (17%) while the 907 developers that use only WebForms slightly prefer Ajax Control Toolkit over jQuery (65% vs 59%).

An interesting stat is about the developers that checked both WebForms and ASP.NET MVC: among these all-round developers the market share of jQuery is even higher: 90%, compared to the 16% of the MS Ajax stack.

Commercial 3rd party libraries

And seems like commercial libraries are starting to gain their space among .NET developers, showing a cumulative 7% gain, going from 20% to 27%: which means that 1 developer out of 4 is using a commercial library. The top spot is held by Telerik with 15,6%, followed by Infragistics with 3,9%. A company that gained a lot of market is DevExpress, which went from 0,7% of 2007 to 3,7%.

Partial rendering vs client library

The last question was about how people are using MS ASP.NET Ajax:

Option	Response %
Partial Rendering /Update Panel	88%
Ajax library + services (JSON or XML)	54%
AJAH (Async Javascript and Html)	36%

Compared to the previous survey nothing changed: the partial rendering trick is still the preferred way of using MS ASP.NET Ajax, even if the percentage felt down a bit (92% to 88%). Another proof of the goodness of this approach is that 1/3rd of the developers have server-side code that directly returns HTML code. And I guess this approach is even more popular with jQuery + ASP.NET MVC where you can easily return a Partial View from you actions and have the Ajax helpers inject it into your views.

Some final random thoughts

17 people (0,7%) responded they don’t use any web UI library: they just plain HTML + JS and Handlers/WCF services on the server. And this approach is even more used than ASP Classic, which is used by only 7 developers 0,3%.

It is pretty impressive that 8,6% of the people that took the survey are still doing Ajax calls manually, without relying on library to ease the development.

The audience

Someone claimed that all the surveys not held by a 3rd party company specialized in interviews are irrelevant since someone else can cheat in order to gain more percentage points. And also because being a non randomly selected audience, it might be biased toward my readers.

Unfortunately I cannot do anything about companies asking its users to vote for them, but I tried to get the wider possible audience. At the end the survey has been linked by Bertrand Le Roy, Scott Hanselman (via twitter), Craig Shoemaker, Brad Abrams, Keyvan Nayyeri, my Italian blog and Pietro Brambati blog (DE in Italy). All these blogs have different kind of audience, and probably more “mainstream” than mine. So I hope this helped solving the bias problem.

Wait, I want more!

Which percentage of developers is using the AJAH approach with ASP.NET MVC? And what about the ones that use Dojo? If you are interested in a particular report, you can either ask in the comments or you can download the raw data and the complete results as Excel spreadsheet (Office 2007 format).

Wrapping up

The big news is that jQuery joined the ASP.NET Ajax stack in term of usage among .NET developers and that lots of developers don’t see the Ajax Control Toolkit as being and abstraction on top of ASP.NET Ajax, and this probably shows that now the ACT is becoming a product on its own.

ASP.NET MVC is used by 32% of developers after only 2 months from the RTM.

Again, a big thank to Keyvan, Bertrand, Brad, Scott Hanselman, Craig, Pietro Brambati and all the others that posted and re-tweeted the link to the survey. And all youg guys that answered the survey: this would have not been possible you.

Now it’s your turn: what do you think about these results?

Tags: ajax,aspnetmvc,asp.net ajax,jquery,survey

Why is my blog even greener?

Simone Chiaretta — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 08:39:39 GMT

I usually don’t do political posts here, but I think what is happening in Iran deserves it. It shows us that most of the Iranian people are totally different from what the media tell us.

I’ve been following what’s happening over there with twitter, and I thought I’d show my support to the cause wearing green on blog. A lot of other sites are doing it (Reddit.com put a green t-shirt on his alien).

If you have a blog you can help spread some love to the guys in Iran: just add a green background to you blog.

I hope all my reader living in Iran are doing fine. And a special mention goes to Keyvan, which authored with me the book about ASP.NET MVC and Madhi, ASP.NET MVC developer. I hope you are both fine.

Tags: IranElection,GreenScream

All Apple WWDC 09 keynote in 1 minute

Simone Chiaretta — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 08:45:10 GMT

For those who were not able to follow live the keynote and have not found two hours of spare time to watch the recorded stream of the WWDC, here you can fine a video that recaps in a little more than 1 minute all the important news announced during the Apple WWDC 2009 keynote. Enjoy:

WWDC 09 in 1 minute

Technorati Tags: apple,wwdc,iphone

Using Request inside Actions: why it is a bad idea

Simone Chiaretta — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:53:13 GMT

Why can’t I use Request["id"] inside an action to get the value of the query string parameter named "id"?

I was asked this questions millions of times in the talks I did about ASP.NET MVC during the last months. I also got it asked a few times from colleagues so, when yesterday a friend asked the same question on a comment on one of my latest posts, I decided that the time had come to try and clarify this with a post.

The quick answer is: “Because you don’t want to have a dependency on the environment, especially since this can be easily avoided”.

But let me explain better. Imagine you want to display a “page” given its id, and you have to process the following url: http://example.com/Home/Page?id=123.

If you use the Request object, your action method will be (NOTE: this is not the recommended way to get the value of a query string parameter):

public ActionResult Page()
{
    int id = Convert.ToInt32(Request["id"]);
    //do something with the id
    return View();
}

Or you can do it the ASP.NET MVC idiomatic way:

public ActionResult Page(int id)
{
    //do something with the id
    return View();
}

What the ASP.NET MVC framework does is automatically initializing the parameters of the action method using the values of the query string parameter with the same name.

This has two big advantages over manually reading the Request object:

it automatically casts to the correct type (in the sample you have a integer) and raises an error if the parameter is of the wrong type. Additionally if the parameters is a complex type (not just string or integer) it is automatically initialized setting values for all its properties. Imagine doing this manually reading the Request object.
it isolates the action method from the environment so that the it is just a normal method with some input parameters and a return value. A side effect of this separation is that you can test the action by just supplying the input values to the method, and without the need to mock the Request object.

Having said that, I admit that there are some scenarios, like when accessing the Cookies collection or when reading the raw request content, this is the only option. But unless you are doing these exotic things, the best solution is using the idiomatic way, and let the framework do all the work for you.

Hope I clarified this a bit more.

Tags: aspnetmvc

Survey on Ajax adoption: some quick stats

Simone Chiaretta — Mon, 25 May 2009 09:05:25 GMT

UPDATE: The survey is closed. The results are published: Ajax survey 2009: jQuery and MS Ajax are almost tied.

After 3 days and a half, with a weekend and a public holiday in between, the survey about Ajax adoption among .NET developers already received 1047 responses. Here some quick stats:

an incredible (in my eyes) 5% claims he is not doing Ajax development at all;
the most used web frameworks is pretty obviously WebForms (89%) followed by ASP.NET MVC (38%);
the most used JavaScript library is jQuery with 76%, followed by Ajax Control Toolkit (58%) and ASP.NET Ajax (48%). And still a good 8% is hand-crafting javascript and ajax calls;
among the ones using ASP.NET Ajax, the vast majority is using the UpdatePanel control (88%) and 58% is using the ASP.NET Ajax client library and talking directly to Json/XML services.

We are still at the point were these answers reflect mostly the readers of my blog, so probably still a bit biased toward the ALT.NET kind of developers. Bertrand Le Roy published a link to the survey on his blog so maybe I’ll receive less biased answers in the next days.

If you haven’t already, please ~~take the survey~~. And if you have a blog, I’d love if you could republish the link:

~~http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB22973CYKW2H~~

More answers means more understanding of how people are using Ajax in .NET, and maybe can help steering the future of Ajax on .NET.

I’ll post a more complete analysis of the results and compare it with the results I collected at the end of 2007 once the survey is closed.

Technorati Tags: ajax,jQuery,ASP.NET Ajax

Survey: Ajax usage among .NET developers in 2009

Simone Chiaretta — Thu, 21 May 2009 14:53:29 GMT

UPDATE2: The survey is closed. The results are published: Ajax survey 2009: jQuery and MS Ajax are almost tied.

UPDATE: I posted some quick stats after 3 days and 1050 answers received

In December 2007, taking inspiration from a survey promoted by Ajaxian, I created a survey to understand in which environment .NET developers are using Ajax, in conjunction with which web framework, and which javascript libraries they are using. Here you can read the results of the survey and the analysis of the results.

But long time passed, so I think it’s useful to repeat the same experiment, with the same questions and see how the answers changed.

~~Take the Ajax usage among .NET developers survey~~

I’ll leave the survey online for a few weeks. Check back in a few weeks for the results, or subscribe to my blog to get the results delivered directly to you.

Technorati Tags: ajax,survey

Book review: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly

Simone Chiaretta — Wed, 20 May 2009 21:11:42 GMT

Now that the book I’m writing with Keyvan has gone to production (will be available in stores at the end of July), I decided to spend some time reading other programming books: I’ve got a few of them in the queue, and I’ll probably post a review of them on my blog.

Quick look at the book

My first review is about another book about ASP.NET MVC: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly, written by the Belgian blogger and community speaker Maarten Balliauw.

This book is, as the title says, a quick overview (around 190 pages plus 50 pages of various appendixes, one of which is about his sample application CarTrackr) on all the aspects of the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 framework.

It starts with the usual “File>New Project” experience and then moves on to a quick overview of the different parts of the framework and the extensibility points that ASP.NET MVC has.

Then it goes more in detail, talking about the main actors (Controllers, Routing, Views) and explaining the some of the most important extensibility points (like custom ActionResults and ActionFilters), Ajax and finally talking about testing, deployment and how to mix classic ASP.NET WebForms with ASP.NET MVC.

You can read more about the book, and the process that lead to it on Maarten’s blog: Announcing my book: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Quickly

Love and hate

What I liked: the chapter about Ajax: it covers the Ajax helper methods and the JsonResult. It performs the same tasks both using ASP.NET Ajax and jQuery: it was very nice to see the same thing implemented with the two techniques. I also really like the chapter about deployment which explains how to configure IIS6 to use ASP.NET MVC: unfortunately not everyone already migrated to IIS7 and this is very great information.

What I didn’t like: This is more a personal taste than else, but I wouldn’t talk about the possibility of using the Request object to read the querystring parameters: true, this is possible, but it’s something that should be avoided. And I wouldn’t use the Visual Studio UnitTest wizard to create the tests for my controllers.

Technorati Tags: aspnetmvc,maarten balliauw,asp.net mvc quickly,book,review

Registration of the Italian ALT.NET Conference is open

Simone Chiaretta — Wed, 13 May 2009 17:40:50 GMT

Today we opened the registration for the IV Italian ALT.NET Conference, that will be held in Bologna on Saturday June 27th and which is was co-organized together with DotNetMarche.

If you are interested in coming, go and register for the conference. But be quick, we opened the registration less than 8 hours ago and we already filled half room (around 45 registered out of 90 seats available).

The agenda has not been finalized yet: the survey to decide the topics is still open (if plan to attend the conference and you haven’t voted yet, please go and vote for the sessions).

At the moment, the most likely sessions are:

A Lap Around Mono
How to design the User Experience
UI Composition: Problems and Solutions
Continuous Integration
and battling for the 5th place:
- Code Metrics & Refactoring Strategy On Legacy Code
- How to componentize views and how to pass data between controllers and views in ASP.NET MVC

Technorati Tags: ugialtnet,conference,dotnetmarche

I’ll be at Stack Overflow DevDays in London

Simone Chiaretta — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:52:19 GMT

I just bought my ticket for the European edition of StackOverflow DevDays conference, that will be held in London on October 28th.

The agenda is not out yet, but I’m pretty sure Jeff and Joel will come out with something interesting, and it seems like it’s not going to be a .NET event, but a technology event about all languages.

Will be fun. And will be great to met some of the guys I know that are living in UK and coming to the event as well, like Nic Wise, Barry Dorrans, Simon Philp and the guys from ALT.NET UK.

Technorati Tags: devdays,stackoverflow,conference