NET Trends Report 2022 – InfoQ.com

Every year, all InfoQ editors invite seasoned developers and practitioners from the industry in order to discuss the current trends within the entire software development landscape. The results of these discussions are published as trend reports, each focusing on one specific set of topics – which we call spaces. These reports help the editorial team curate and deliver high-quality news and articles to our readers while ensuring that we are covering the currently most relevant topics and technologies.

All of our reports are built upon the particular well-known framework developed by Geoffrey Moore in his book “Crossing the Chasm. ” Moore’s platform describes four stages that can assist understand how technologies adoption evolves: “innovators, inch “early adopters, ” “early majority, ” and “late majority. inch

At InfoQ, the. NET space comprises all technologies directly related to. INTERNET. That means not only what’s included in the official. NET releases but also frameworks and systems that directly impact the particular. NET ecosystem, projects plus initiatives using. NET, major use cases, and methods and approaches specifically aimed at that will space.

Our trend reports are composed of two different parts. The first one is a written report containing almost all topics discussed by our own editorial team, divided into the 4 stages mentioned above. This is the statement you are usually currently reading. Here, we will present our developments graph, starting from “Late Majority” and moving toward the “Innovators” state. This way, we can also present the general analysis of the particular current status of the. NET space, discuss industry ownership of specific technologies, and present details on particular topics plus trends.

The second part is an InfoQ Podcast episode covering some or all associated with the subjects presented in the written record. These episodes are informal panels with InfoQ editors and expert practitioners from the industry. For this year’s. INTERNET report, all of us discussed the latest user interface and conversation developments.

. NET Trends: 2022

Observing the graph above makes it easy to establish a correlation between the topics listed and Microsoft’s latest developments within the. NET environment. Even though our analysis is not focused on nor driven by a single company’s releases, in the last few years, the company’s efforts to establish and keep. NET as a power player in the software advancement scene were beyond considerable.  

A clear indication of that is the fact that the particular latest versions of. INTERNET – from Core 3. 1 in order to 7 – are existing in three from the four stages above, while at the same time, they represent less than three years of long-term releases .  

Source: Microsoft

Late Majority

Right before. NET Core 3. 1 was released, Microsoft announced the Primary project because “ the future of. NET . ” With . INTERNET 5 , the company introduced its intentions to create an unified system. All things considered, and even with the progress of the initial releases associated with. NET Core, this was no small feat: that meant producing a single runtime plus framework that could be used everywhere, in multiple operating systems, with uniform runtime behaviors and developer experiences (which, of course , included all the tooling).

Source: Microsoft

At the same time, however, the unified approach introduced with. NET 5 (and all of the preceding changes through. NET Primary 3. 1) also allowed for different construction lifecycles within its produces – take Blazor , for example: whilst the web version of the framework has been around since 2018, Blazor Hybrid (for hybrid desktop/mobile clients) was only available in. INTERNET 6, together with ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation for Blazor WebAssembly. That’s why we see “Blazor” in our “early majority” stage, while “Blazor Cross Apps” appear under “Innovators. ” 

Frameworks evolving at different paces and a list of considerable breaking changes make it difficult with regard to companies that will already migrated from. NET Framework to. NET Core or. INTERNET 5 to move to newer. NET variations. We expect this situation to change since these. NET versions reach the end of support (November 2022 for. INTERNET Core a few. 1, and November 2023 for. NET 5).

Early Majority

Mostly due to performance improvements plus relevant changes in ASP. NET 6. 0,. INTERNET 6 will be the version used simply by the early majority. Blazor and Xamarin are also being used by main players in the industry, reflecting both the technology’s stability and the particular availability of specialized developers.  

In terms of communication, the increasing adoption of gRPC plus SignalR are usually consistent with the overall scenario. According in order to our most recent Architecture Trends Report , gRPC is usually present in the “Late Majority” state — which shows that the. NET crowd is definitely following the particular same direction. Simultaneously, the reason regarding the relatively late re-homing of gRPC can be attributed to its predecessor: WCF , used up to. INTERNET Framework 4. 8. 1, which has been Microsoft’s one-size-fits-all communication framework for building service-oriented applications. That incorporated both web-based communication and inter-process conversation (named pipes).

In our. NET podcast episode, we talked about the deprecation of WCF and the role of gRPC in. INTERNET. Irina Scurtu, one of the podcast panelists, talks about her current experience with gRPC in. NET:

There are so many options to maneuver data from one side to another, especially along with microservice architectures or event-driven or anything in among that requires back and forth requests plus data transfer over the wire. Then it’s hard intended for developers to choose if they were to be put in that situation. But to become honest, what I’m seeing is that rest or even HTTP APIs are still the go-to option for implementing APIs. GRPC is starting to have some traction, but yet again, there is not enough maturation for it in. INTERNET.

Another interesting topic in this stage is related to user interfaces (UI): Microsoft launched . NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI) in 2020 as an evolution from the Xamarin. Forms toolkit. It is a cross-platform framework to get creating native mobile and desktop apps with C# and XAML.  

After two years of being available only as a preview, the first recognized MAUI version was launched last month . However, there are still hundreds of bugs open on GitHub, which is one of the reasons why the official release is being considered the premature launch by the particular community. All these factors put MAUI in the “Innovators” stage.

In the meantime, we all had mainly two various UI frameworks adopted by. NET designers. The first one can be Flutter , first released by Google in 2017. It’s open-source, built with the Dart programming language (also developed by Google), and it’s steadily growing as a cross-platform UI framework used with the. NET backend.

The second framework had been Uno   Platform, an (also) open-source, cross-platform UI platform built upon top associated with. NET. Uno Platform furthermore supports XAML and can end up being used to build Mobile, Desktop, plus Web programs with WebAssembly (WASM) : similarly in order to Blazor. The platform has been steadily developing in terms of usage, including simply by Microsoft: the particular recently-released Windows Community Toolkit Labs was built making use of Uno.

Francis Tanguay, another one of our podcast panelists, discusses the current diversity of USER INTERFACE platforms within the. NET ecosystem:

There are quite a few points happening, and some confusion as well, in the market as to what’s available to use pertaining to app growth and what is actually ready in the market. Cross-platform app development plus UI frameworks have been increasing rapidly within the final decade or so. […] When you’re looking at the particular curve of adoption, obviously, at some point, you have something stable that can be adopted with a majority associated with people. […] For newcomers, there are even more challenges from an architectural point of view, right? Once you have an UI construction and if you’re ready to build your 1st app that needs to connect in order to whatever communication layer, should it be REST APIs or gRPC? And then a person need to start thinking about things like: How you serialize data. How do you navigate between your pages? How can you manage data in your application? There’re so many different challenges.

Early Adopters and Innovators

Most of the subjects in this stage had been released together last year along with. NET six, so it is expected through an industry perspective. There are exceptions, such as Blazor WASM (released a few years ago) and F# – which usually still has a relatively low use by. INTERNET developers.  

Minimal APIs were released with ASP. NET Core 6, and these people represent a potential advantage for microservices developers since they allow the creation associated with HTTP APIs with minimal dependencies (much less boilerplate code). These people also simplify the development process by allowing the particular API endpoints to become added to the app’s configuration file (no more MVC).  

First released within 2019, the particular idea behind ML. INTERNET is in order to provide. NET developers along with the same machine learning (ML) capabilities found in the Python ecosystem. It encompasses the classic concept of the ML pipeline, from collecting data to building and training models. However, within doing so, it also competes directly with other well-established tools or even frameworks. The particular crescent popularity of the particular SciSharp Stack – which provides binding for frameworks such because TensorFlow plus Keras – can be seen since a reflection of the popularity and adoption of Python-based tools, such as. In any case, the 

Source Generators were very first released along with. NET 5, and they are a good method to reduce the amount associated with repetitive code that needs to be written. One of its frequently used applications is associated to high-performance logging , which may drive the increased adopting in the future.  

With the growing popularization of DevOps, we can also see a good increase in usage associated with AzureDevOps APIs by. INTERNET developers working on this particular area – but it is, of course, limited to developers using Azure as part of their cloud stack. If you’re interested within the present scenery for DevOps and Cloud, you can check our own 2022 Styles Report .

Following the current state associated with. NET six (and the particular expected functions of. NET 7), all of us already have most of the upcoming features becoming used simply by. NET innovators.. NET 7 is expected to be much faster than its predecessor , and OR NET. NET Primary 7 brings the established MAUI release and Blazor Hybrid Apps. C# 11 is also integrated in just about all. NET 7 Preview releases, which is certainly why you observe all of these topics grouped with each other in this stage.

An additional promise associated with. NET 7 is better assistance for containers and cloud-native development scenarios, which includes programmer experience, tooling, and overall execution.