Not all Microsoft developers' heads are in the cloud -- yet

.NET developers may be taking advantage of many of the cloud-based tools and resources that are now available in the world, but a sizeable portion aren't quite ready to jump into the cloud just yet. Close to one-third say on-premises is fine for their needs and deliverables right now.

That's just one takeaway from a survey of 1,017 .NET developers, compiled and written by Ed Charbeneau, John Bristowe and Sam Basu. The survey was sponsored by Telerik, a Progress company. The results reflect the perspectives of a huge piece of the developer community -- 1.7 million work with the .NET framework.

The survey finds platform as a service (PaaS) is the most appealing aspect of cloud to .NET developers -- 36% use the cloud to host their applications. Another 19% use cloud primarily to build apps. Still, 31% report they are "not considering the cloud and are staying on-premises."

Not that .NET developers are limiting their scope. In fact, the vast majority, 70%, consider themselves to be "full-stack" developers, building everything from the user interface to the back-end database.

The survey also finds that JavaScript is big in the .NET world, and "has the status of a second mother-tongue," used by 74% of developers. Angular is the most intriguing JavaScript framework--70% of the respondents would go for it if they were building web applications with JavaScript.

For mobile developers, Xamarin/C# is the most favored cross-platform mobile development option, with 52% of respondents saying that's how they would go about building a cross-platform app. At the same time, 22% would not use a cross-platform tool, despite the fact that there are so many mobile devices and app platforms floating around these days.

The Telerik survey finds a majority of .NET developers are not familiar with Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform (UWP) application paradigm, now being pushed hard with Windows 10. UWP is intended to enable Windows developers to write an app once and run it on every Windows device -- be it phones, tablets, PCs or even Xboxes. UWP-developed apps, which use .NET Core as their runtime, even may find their way into wearable computers and devices.

At this time, mobile developers the most favorable toward UWP development, with 35% stating they agreed with the paradigm. Another 27% of Windows desktop developers favor UWP, along with 18% of web developers. Only eight percent of .NET desktop developers are currently using UWP at this time, the survey report adds.

For more perspective (and greater technical detail) on these survey results, check out Nora Georgieva's blog post at the Telerik site.