C# feels kinda nice because it's a good balance.
Very good static typing, Roslyn analyzers, good tooling and decent hot reload (for a compiled language), really good ORM (EF Core) that implements UoW and reduces a lot of the need for transaction management (simplifying the code), flexible enough and fast enough for various kinds of use cases.
Source generators are underrated as well since they can make the code very terse and legible by generating a lot of standard boilerplate.
I've written this before, but C# is a great language held back by its culture. I'd say that 80% of C# shops I've seen used it because they were started in the late 00s by some IT guy with a surplus HP server and a dream whose whole world was Microsoft products. They were staffed by people with little knowledge of OSS products who self-identify as ".NET developers" instead of software engineers. Almost invariably they seem to have some gnarly legacy monolith that everybody is slowly chipping away at while old-timers continue deploying .NET services to IIS running on Azure VMs because it's a small evolution of what they've been doing for the better part of 20 years.
In the interest of fairness the San Francisco version of this is also a thing: a giant, untyped ball of Rails spaghetti from the same period running on Heroku that everybody has Stockholm Syndrome'd their way into loving because of Ruby's elegance and beauty. The burden is merely shifted from a large Microsoft to a series of small SaaS companies :-)
Exceptions to this rule exist (hence my "80%") and modern .NET is lovely but it seems that the non-Java/Python mindshare is now taken up by the Golangs and Rusts of the world. It's a true shame since I do love C# for basically being a better Java.
Hmm, I am working on C# microservices based apps since 6 years ago. And I always deployed on cloud using Linux, usually in Kubernetes. I used Google Cloud and AWS beside Azure.
The whole stack is open source, Kubernetes, Docker, Hashicorp tools, Postgres, Redis, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, NATS, Kafka, Prometheus, Elastic Search, Kibana, Grafana and so on and so forth.
Yeah C# is fantastic. I also love EF.
I stopped using it because overall it feels like Microsoft has lost the plot with .NET.
What I hate about .NET is the atrocious naming.
Net Core, Net Framework, Net Common Core, .NET..
And God forbid any of these frameworks ever expose what they are in a config file. You start a project, hand it to a colleague and he can't figure out whether it's Framework or Core by looking at the files. You Google and are immediately bombarded by 15 year old threads.
If you start a project with .NET Framework in 2026, you're doing it wrong, plain and simple.
And the .csproj files do tell you which .NET they are.
<TargetFrameworkVersion>v4.</TargetFrameworkVersion> or <TargetFramework>net4</TargetFramework> is the old framework. Also, if the file is an unreadable mess listing all .cs files, it's generally .NET Framework.
<TargetFramework>netstandard2.0</TargetFramework> is .NET Standard 2.0, which means this library can be consumed from either Framework or modern .NET.
And finally, <TargetFramework>netX.0</TargetFramework> (X >= 5) is the modern .NET.
Most web projects use JSON files for configuration. There are also some XML files for project configuration. If anything, you can run into too much configuration files.
>C# feels kinda nice because it's a good balance.
From my experience it's awesome to write C# with AI. But both Opus and GLM usually one shot the modification to the file so I didn't experienced cases lately where AI had to fix compile errors. True, I gave the AI agents the lsp for C#, so maybe that helps.