Got ya, thanks for explaining.

Legacy C# projects can be a mess, I've stepped away after a month or from one or two projects in the past simply because it was beyond fixable - I think there is clean way to use c# and there is an over-engineered way (typically java devs that try to use the exact same patterns in c#, which bloats it).

You are right, the past 3 years or with .net core and .net standard was messy too! They should've just named it something different. Same with Entity Framework. I'm still steaming about them using the same names for everything, as there are plenty cases when things don't work the same way as before. It completely screwed googling things.

And any desktop development was broken too for a time (still bugging out with new .net core xaml editor) - so yeah, skip.

I primarily use C# for api's and tooling (my own build server is code I wrote myself in C#, hosting my own git repo's (not using gitlab/bitbucket etc; rather bare repositories!), and my own nuget server). But for anything web/desktop related, meh skip. In C# api land, you can get such clean/unbloated code with full type safety and compiler checks, I love it. Most C# devs use/throw exceptions but they really muddy the water and make it feel like Java. My own code only have try/catch when talking to the outside world (harddrive, network, etc), the rest of the layers are clean and with minimal null checks (cause at those layers I never have nulls). Exceptions are expensive/slow too, so rather catch it as early as possible and return a Result object (not built in, my own envelope) instead of rethrowing multiple times and doing a crazy amount of null checks. So it is possible to write "clean" C# but most commercial projects I've seen is pretty darn ugly.

Just an fyi, I don't use appveyor/windows/powershell/Azure at all. I work primarily from Fedora with Jetbrains products, with most of my tooling being hand rolled. I use the Digital Ocean Api to manage all my boxes and use SSH.NET (nuget package that can open ssh tunnels in C#, I use it for all sorts of things, incl reaching my db servers (ssh.net + Npgsql)) and FluentFtp if needed. So I don't really touch Microsoft's ecosystem at all. My builder code calls the dotnet sdk and I copy the build artifacts around as needed - no third parties involved. In the beginning I stressed about going this way but I see now how great it is - no need to worry about CI minutes or paying Gitlab or Bitbucket, or dealing with 10 different api keys or dealing with Azure etc. So it's totally possible to have sanity - but to be honest I cannot take "my way" to work as everything is hand rolled - people want to use Gitlab/Bitbucket etc else they lose their minds (other developers seems to be my biggest enemy these days - everything needs to match to their exact pattern else they quit). So yeah, own clients = own stack.

On the visual studio side, the IDE has gotten slower and slower... I have a 6 core cpu, 32Gb ram and a Samsung nvme drive, RX580.. yet visual studio lags like crazy, intellisense take 2 minutes to update etc.. that's with only VS open and no extra extensions installed. It also crashes sometimes while doing nothing out of the ordinary. So not sure what the heck they are doing to the project at Microsoft. On the otherhand, the jetbrains products have super slow startup times (try 10 to 30 seconds for Rider and Datagrip) but once in, they work great!

Another cool thing to note, Gitkraken sees my bare git repositories as valid remotes (provided ssh keys are in place) and pushes to them without issue (and near instantly, bitbucket push takes 20s no matter what I do).

Sorry for dumping all of this on you!