The .NET bindings for Spark were introduced earlier in the year at the Spark + AI Summit. Until their introduction Spark was accessible by coding using Scala, Java, Python or R but not .NET.

The .NET bindings are written on the Spark interop layer, and are designed to provide high performance bindings to multiple languages. One advantage of the bindings is that they are compliant with .NET Standard. This is a formal specification of .NET APIs that are common across .NET implementations, meaning that you can use .NET for Apache Spark anywhere you write .NET code.

The current version of .NET for Apache Spark has APIs for using Apache Spark from C# and F#. These support all areas of Spark including Spark SQL for working with structured data, and Spark Streaming.

.NET for Apache Spark is available by default in Azure HDInsight, and can be installed in Azure Databricks, Azure Kubernetes Service, AWS Databricks, and AWS EMR.

The new survey is designed to find out what experiences developers have had using the current release of .NET for Apache Spark, and what 'challenges' they've encountered. This will be used to see where the product can be improved. Questions in the survey ask what language you're currently using, and what kind of app in terms of cloud/mobile/desktop. Other questions cover the tools you're currently using to develop Spark, and the frameworks, libraries and cloud services you've used.