Tim Corey on YouTube has excellent beginner C# material. I would start there.

The OP ruled out zig and rust already

They are for sure talking about the ARM servers from Oracle. You get 24gb of memory and 4 cpu cores that you can carve into virtual machines.

Issue is that the free stock is very limited, and there have been some claims of people having their free service resources reclaimed by Oracle.

Still, if you can get one, it is probably the best you can get for free.

https://isevenapi.xyz/

MySQL (and by extension, MariaDB) has an even better option:

mysql --i-am-a-dummy

Few thoughts:

1. What is being made? Can’t really care about it without having some idea
2. What makes this company’s version of it worth our interest?
3. How is it better than the FOSS solutions that in this day and age almost definitely already exist
4. Why are we to put our faith in this group for pay once software when their two major products are SaaS?

Who is in the wrong? Your manager, for not giving you time to refactor? Or you for giving him the option?

True, but he mentions .NET development is Windows first, and even mentions that you have “some IDE’s that work with it, like Rider”. He kind of said it without mentioning the specific IDE.

Rider is the real MVP anyways.