C# in Production: Survey Reveals Leaders Among .NET Frameworks

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

The .NET ecosystem continues to evolve rapidly, and for C# developers, choosing the right framework for production is a critically important task. A recent survey conducted among professional .NET developers shed light on the real picture of industry preferences. We analyzed the results and are ready to share the key findings.

Top 5 Frameworks for Production

The survey showed a clear division between "heavy artillery" for the web and specialized solutions for mobile and desktop applications. Here is how the respondents' votes were distributed:

• ASP.NET Core (82%): The undisputed leader. More than 8 out of 10 developers use this cross-platform framework to build high-load web applications, APIs, and microservices. Its performance, built-in Dependency Injection support, and middleware flexibility make it the de facto standard.
• Blazor (45%): The year's biggest "upstart." Blazor allows you to write interactive web UIs in C# instead of JavaScript. It is especially popular in corporate intranet systems (Blazor Server) and SPA applications (Blazor WebAssembly).
• Entity Framework Core (78%): Although this is an ORM, not a web framework, virtually everyone uses it in conjunction with ASP.NET Core. EF Core provides convenient database interaction and supports many providers (SQL Server, PostgreSQL, SQLite).
• MAUI (29%): The successor to Xamarin.Forms. It is used for cross-platform mobile (iOS/Android) and desktop (Windows/macOS) applications. It still lags behind web solutions in popularity but is actively gaining momentum.
• Windows Forms / WPF (34%): Classics for desktop on Windows. Despite their age, these frameworks are still actively used in legacy projects and specialized software (e.g., for medical or financial systems).

Unexpected Trends

The study revealed several interesting patterns. First, there is a sharp increase in interest in gRPC (18% of respondents) — it is chosen for high-performance microservices where serialization speed is important. Second, SignalR (36%) has become the standard for implementing real-time functionality (chats, notifications, live dashboards).

Notably, 67% of respondents use "pure" ASP.NET Core without additional add-ons like ServiceStack or Nancy. This speaks to the maturity of the framework — developers find the built-in functionality sufficient for most tasks.

What Does This Mean for Developers?

If you are just starting to learn C# for production development, your priority should be ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework Core. This is the foundation that will open doors to 80% of job openings. For web UIs, you should consider Blazor — especially if your team does not want to fragment the stack between C# and JavaScript. For mobile development, MAUI is becoming a logical choice, although the ecosystem is still being refined.

The survey confirms: .NET is a living, modern platform where classic solutions (WPF, WinForms) peacefully coexist with cutting-edge technologies (Blazor, gRPC). The choice of framework