Question

What is the proportion of .NET developers who do WinForms/desktop development vs ASP.NET development? Is there very much overlap? Are they very different skill-sets?

Answer 1

My guess-timate is that it’s probably a 60/40 split in favor of web development. But I think a more interesting trend is that both the web and windows camps are seeing significant schisms.

Windows definitely is definitely splitting along the WPF and non-WPF lines, since WPF presents such a different UI model. WPF is still a small percentage of Windows developers, but it’s definitely gaining some ground. I’d guess that WPF probably only makes up 10-20 percent of Windows development.

Web development may be more interesting as you not only have the Silverlight split going on, but you also have the MVC split happening. Traditional ASP.NET development is still king, but MVC definitely is gaining significant traction and Silverlight is becoming a powerful niche. Maybe a 60-25-15 split among ASP.NET, MVC and Silverlight respectively — which isn’t bad at all for relatively new technologies.

There are definitely overlapping areas of skill across these areas (biz tier and data tier development, along with WCF services), but the UI development paradigm is very different. Having a windows forms developer switch over to an asp.net web form project will require a bit of a learning curve if it’s his/her first web form project.

I’m basing my guess-timates on what I see in my regional user group communities and discussions with some leaders in those communities. Definitely not scientific. 🙂