Survey: Which C# (.NET) Frameworks Are Actually Used in Production

Survey: Which C# (.NET) Frameworks Are Actually Used in Production

The .NET ecosystem continues to actively develop, and along with it, the number of frameworks and libraries multiplies. But which of them are truly in demand in real projects, and not just in pet projects and tutorials? We conducted a survey among professional C# developers in commercial development to find out the current picture.

More than 800 respondents took part in the survey — from juniors to team leads. Here are the results we obtained.

• ASP.NET Core (MVC + Web API) — the absolute leader. More than 76% of respondents use it in production. This is not surprising: cross-platform compatibility, high performance, and broad support from Microsoft make it the standard for web development in C#.
• Blazor (Server + WebAssembly) — in second place with a result of 23%. Interest in Blazor is growing, especially in scenarios where a team wants to write both frontend and backend in the same language. However, there are fewer production projects than desired — many note issues with build size in WASM.
• WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) — used in 18% of production projects. These are mainly enterprise desktop applications, legacy systems, and internal tools. WPF remains a reliable choice for Windows-only solutions.
• MAUI (.NET Multi-platform App UI) — only 7% of respondents have implemented it in production. Despite the promise of cross-platform compatibility, developers complain about the framework's immaturity, lack of components, and performance issues on Android.
• gRPC services — 11% of respondents use gRPC for microservice architecture. This framework is gaining popularity in high-load systems and when interacting with Go/Python services.
• Entity Framework Core — although it is an ORM, not a framework, it can be considered an integral part of the .NET stack. 89% of respondents use EF Core in production projects.
• Xamarin.Forms / Xamarin.Native — 4% of respondents still support legacy projects on Xamarin, but there are virtually no new developments.

Interestingly, the survey also mentioned NancyFX, ServiceStack, and Orleans (Microsoft Orleans) — niche frameworks used by less than 2% of participants, but their communities remain active.

Another important finding: many developers combine several frameworks. A typical production project stack in 2025 looks like this: ASP.NET Core Web API + Blazor for the admin panel + WPF for the desktop client + gRPC for inter-service communication.

Thus, if you are just starting to learn C# or planning to switch to .NET, your first choice should be ASP.NET Core. Blazor and MAUI are promising technologies, but their time for mass production has not yet arrived. And WPF is a reliable classic for Windows developers.

We will continue to monitor trends and publish fresh data on pythonlib.ru. Which .NET framework do you use? Share in the comments!