- Industrial strength language with static types. I used Python and JS a lot, I'm passing.
- Good tooling support, not every language has this.
- Good support in general, backwards compatibility (or side by side support).
- Game development possibilities with Unity.
- Mobile development with Xamarin.
- WebAssembly support already in motion with Blazor.
- Not cool, which is exactly what I want in tech. Fads don't belong in tech. Means more job opportunities for me too.
- Good serverside platform with .Net Core.
- Native on the most popular desktop platform.
- With full MS stack, opens up the option of being the sole IT guy at a small to midsize company. It's certainly possible.
- Similar to Java, lets me move over with minimal disruption if the job market demands.
- Write once, jobs everywhere. I can move back to the smaller area that I'm from. I live in Chicago right now but I've worked in 3 countries, 3 US states & .Net is popular enough in all those locales.
- Career stability, less technical churn in the C#/SQL space (and Java). I'm very tired of flavor of the week scripting languages that are many times really used heavily in NYC & SF.
- I'm not looking to learn new languages all the time. I'm looking to perfect myself as a consummate professional developer. I want to fully envelop all the things that I think people should, discrete mathematics, design patterns and I think learning new languages is great but there are other ways to become an exceptional programmer.
For me, it was C# or Java to base the next leg of my career on. I like the abstraction layer they're on, on a technical basis I think they nailed it. Sometimes newer isn't better. This isn't going to be popular, because a lot of people believe in Javascript and invested heavily there career-wise. I didn't want to and wasm is going to chunk out 25% of the single language fullstack market from Javascript in 5 years anyway and keep taking. Ideally going forward on the web side, I would only do a SPA with Blazor or static pages.
That's why I like C#. I'm looking forward to many relatively stable years in my career within the C#/SQL world without the trends. If it collapses, Java is in a similar situation marketwise.