I use c# also to earn my money. Sadly the new custom to hyperinflation in language sugar and framework makes following new things quite hard. Even today starting a new project I choose .net framework 3.5 and syntax. I know this sounds extreme but 3.5 has anything I need to build great software. It also offers a very tested environment. Setting up the software stack is a very easy process. Programmed following v2 runtime also work on v4 runtime so only a simple config file side by side to exe makes it run on any windows machine without any framework deployment.

.NET Framework 3.5 is so old it’s not available by default on Windows (maybe not available at all on the latest Windows), you’d probably have to work with ancient developer tooling to work with it, it’s probably unsupported and has security issues.

And that’s ignoring how you’re essentially severely handicapping yourself in terms of what is possible.

Unless you’re in an environment stuck 20 years in the past (which implies serious security liabilities considering they must be a Microsoft shop), this is a mind bogglingly bizarre strategy.

3.5 is approaching end of life in the next few years, you definitely should not building anything new with it. There's a lot of QoL changes in modern .NET that makes your life as a developer significantly nicer. Even for building windows services, the modern Generic Host model is orders of magnitude better than anything in .NET Framework.

I remember these days. But I have to say: .NET Core and .NET 5+ are awesome. They bring this ease you speak about into the cloud, into Linux, into containers. Obviously with the notable exception of UI development, but there the landscape has turned 5 times since 3.5 was released in 2007.

This is a strange take to me. I've been doing .NET for 25 years now. I don't see why you can't just write your code in "Framework 3.5" style in Visual Studio/VSCode 2026 with .NET 10? I would think almost any file from 3.5 would just drop in and compile with practically zero changes. I can't even think of any new language features that are being forced upon the developer.