.NET is alive and well in corporate environments. For web development I'd never choose it, however for Windows apps it's my goto. Visual Studio is great.
I'm not a full time software developer so I'm probably just slow and cumbersome in general. I mainly program in vb.net for any kind of windows app I'm going to distribute for others to use. I also use python a lot for any kind of web scraping, back end automation type stuff. I enjoy working in Visual Studio, seems real good to me. Easy to find help if I need it.
It's not slow. Lambda expressions are especially awesome. The only thing I find slightly annoying is sometimes you're forced to define a class for an object. However, it can be helpful to define classes in terms of code maintainability with a large code base.
C# is a beautiful language. I had to learn it for the job I took out of college, and I was resentful at first because I'm a hard 'nix guy, but eventually I came around to it.
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