Some folks out there still think .NET is Windows only. Some folks out there haven't looked at C# since the .NET Framework days. Some folks out there are still salty about some of Microsoft's decision around OSS (debugger, hot reload fiasco, etc.)

But day to day working with C# and .NET for backends? It's really fantastic. AI seems to like it a lot and a lot of tools for agents to go HAM. Roslyn analyzer, source generators, workable hot reload (for a compiled language), tons of really good docs from Microsoft, generally low variance and high consistency from codebase to codebase (e.g. encountering Drizzle vs Prisma vs TypeORM vs Kysely vs ... in Node land).

My previous team switched from TS to C# and F#[0][1] and it was a blessing; a lot of the platform ops have been simplified. It's just one very solid tool chain and packages are generally stable (a lot less effort on maintaining platform config/tooling and more focus on just building). First party packages get consistent security updates and C# doesn't have nearly the same level of exposure to transitive packages that one encounters with JS/TS ecosystem.

C# feels like a really solid choice in the age of AI coding because of it's general stability, strong static analyzer, insistence on types, and really good tooling. Not right for all use cases (e.g. CLI, serverless functions), but fantastic for backend APIs.

If you're looking to do AI with/on C#, I wrote about some of my experience with making codebases successful for AI[2].

[0] https://engineering.usemotion.com/moving-off-of-typescript-e...

[1] https://typescript-is-like-csharp.chrlschn.dev/

[2] https://chrlschn.dev/blog/2026/08/the-unexpected-ai-stack-cs...

I wound up going to college after working retail at Disney, then after college, my first job was supposed to be C# but they didn't have the project approved, so I got my first exposure to Python - which I loved, then JavaScript - which I hated but have a love-hate with to this day, and finally C#, but it wasn't .NET 3.5 no, they started using .NET Core, which was... something else, lots of teeth pulling during the original .NET Core days.

So many wonderful projects made with .NET my only complaint is I wish Microsoft would make a cross-platform GUI stack they'd actually stick to, and make it work on Linux too. ;)

I know there's alternatives but nothing beats telling your coworkers "lets just use the built-in" when choosing a GUI stack.

Be aware

    (decimal)0.1
    // .NET 10: 0.1
    // .NET 11: 0.1000000000000000055511151231

But I'm on linux now. If I wanted to pick up back up then what should I be using?

They burried the lede on this one.

- .NET 10 is end of life'd on Nov 14th, 2028 - .NET 11 is end of life'd on Nov 9th, 2028

Which means anyone who upgrades to 11 has fewer days of support. But the idea is that you'll upgrade to 12 as soon as it's RTM'd.

The problem with that is I have clients who refuse to budge from 2.1 (or even upgrade to the 2.1 re-release: 2.3).

However they still suffer from an incredible branding problem.

It's really too bad because as a runtime it's fairly incredible, and F# in particular is fun to work with. They also have good cross-platform support and tooling, which they didn't have a number of years ago.

Combine that with the fact that nobody really writes code anyway thanks to AI, and this could be a slam dunk runtime for an AI-native development environment.

But it will never happen.

Either you should not be forced to upgrade, or backward compatibility should be guaranteed -- not both. But Microsoft is happy to say "hey, we're going to completely abandon support for every version of .NET every 2 years, and if you can't keep up to date then everything that goes wrong is all your fault." Meanwhile, they have no problem breaking your code.

This essentially kills the possibility of just writing a bunch of small, useful libraries, and having them be useful forever. It is the antithesis of a healthy software ecosystem. Are you really expecting that every single open source library that is referenced by a reference of your references is going to be maintained in the face of breaking changes every 2 years? If not, then upgrading your version of .NET is just a gamble that things won't randomly break. But you must upgrade, or you're a bad developer who's leaving your apps vulnerable and every automated security checking system in the world will yell at you about how awful you are. You must upgrade everything you have ever written every two years, and hope that every library you've ever depended on does the same, or you are putting yourself at risk of some breaking change sneaking its way in, or leaving yourself vulnerable to a critical security issue that Microsoft refuses to back-apply.

I cannot understand why I'm the only one shouting from the rooftops about this. It's completely unacceptable to me.

but job offers are kind of boring :/

Not quite discriminated unions, but close. With an exhaustive checker with switch statements.

Now if only it made creating unique types easy, so I wouldn’t have to use a library like VOgen, the language would be nearly as good as F#