[cjblomqvist]

> My only hangup is that I have had my confidence shaken by Microsoft's occasional showing of hand...

I think a really good strategy is to try to see if your goals align here. That's where C#/MS shines compared to many other languages supported by companies. Their interest is in you using C#, because they know that drives Azure adoption (well-known main reason why they're spending money on .NET). MS as a company also has a very long term strategic interest in selling stuff where it's awesome to have a ton of developers in their environment. It's been like that forever. Say what you want about Balmer, but he was very clear on this "developers, developers, developers". It's in their core DNA. A lot of their main product lines excel due to the mass of developers around them; Office (eg SharePoint and integrations), Business Central/ERP (integrations, plugins), Windows (ecosystem of software), Azure (including tooling such as Visual Studio, VSC). Gaming/Search/Live I'm less sure about, but at least for gaming C# probably helps.