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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.

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.