Thanks to everybody that answered the survey! I'm very happy about the amount and the quality of the responses we got: almost 900. This will be a great source of information for planning the future of MonoDevelop. I hope we can repeat this survey next year.

The results are summarized here.

Here are some initials considerations:

• 71% of responders are using MD to some degree. It means that who responded the survey is mostly our current user base. Not surprising since the survey was advertised only in the common Mono mailing lists and blogs.
• People mostly use MD to build GTK# applications, which means that we'll have to keep improving our integrated designer.
• There is more demand for System.Windows.Forms than for ASP.NET, although the numbers are close. I'm kind of surprised about that, since ASP.NET has been working very well in mono for several years. Looks like we'll have S.W.F around for long time.
• Not surprising that C# is used by 95% of responders, but I expected more VB.NET demand as a secondary language. It's almost in pair with Boo. We clearly need to improve our support for C/C++.
• Little demand for .NET 1.1. Most of projects are based on .NET 2.0 nowadays. MD still defaults to 1.1 when creating a project. That's because the 2.0 profile it is not yet officially supported by Mono. Maybe we should consider defaulting to 2.0 anyway. Amazing amount of people willing to develop applications for Silverlight.
• No big surprises on the target platform.
• Most of responders is using bleeding edge GNOME. I would expect corporate developers to use older GNOME versions. Does it mean we don't have many corporate users?
• We've done a good job fixing bugs, but stability is still the most important problem that our users have. However, I feel that many of those stability issues are not being reported, and we can't fix them if they are not reported. Maybe we should make it easier to provide feedback?
• In the comments some people are requesting features that MD already has (for example, support for .NET 2.0). This should be considered an usability problem, because it means that those features are not easy enough to find.
• 289 responders interested in developing MD add-ins? wow
• Number 1 feature request is the debugger. That was expected, and it will be priority #1 when the debugger is finished.
• Big interest for a Windows.Forms designer. We'll have to look on the work done by Ivan Zlatev on the designer, and see how it could be integrated in MD.
• People request better editing tools. We have a good code base to start offering better intellisense and refactoring operations, but our text editor based on GtkSourceView is limiting us.
• The feature ranking will be helpful in priorizing the work to do (at least in the core MD team), although I know that list is not complete.
• I know the survey is not perfect. It is the first time I do something like that. The next one will be better :)

MonoDevelop 1.0 is just around the corner, and it is mostly feature frozen. Now it is time to start thinking beyond 1.0. I published this this survey to get a more clear view of what MonoDevelop is being used for, and what features are the most requested. This will help us planning the future directions of the project.

Thank you for your feedback!

Yesterday we released the second beta of MonoDevelop (release notes here). This is mainly a bug fix release. It has tons of bug fixes (and a few new bugs I found while waiting for the packages, but such is life!). There are also some new features and improvements:

• Basic support for ASP.NET web project deployment.
• Support for Visual Studio 2005 web application projects.
• Generation of satellite assemblies for localized resources.
• Makefile generation improvements

We are getting closer to 1.0. The next release will be in about 1 month, just after the Mono Summit. If everything goes as planned, this will be our first RC.

Now let's go back to work. Lots of things to do in three weeks.