A lot of the skills required are like any other platform or language (conditions, decision making, etc), but with .NET you have a few additional options that will require separate skills: This is just a very short list of possibilities: Language: Object oriented C# or VB.NET, or functional F# Platform: Web/ASP.NET ), IoT , Desktop In my experience, as someone who works mostly with C# with ASP.NET the skills that came in handy for me were: Understanding generics How object oriented programming applies to .NET Making good use of implicit variables General understanding of the ASP.NET web page lifecycle How to work with data in a .NET application (preventing sql injection with parameters, when a stored procedure would be better than building the query or statement, how to map application objects to data)

😂 all day every day

Don't be afraid! You can really make that thing you want to make! YES, YOU!

I used Atom before Microsoft, but when working with .NET I use Visual Studio a lot - the tooling is perfect for me there. I was converted to VS Code when I joined Microsoft. I still use Atom for a few other things (I don't want to abandon my Add-on setup I worked so hard on!), but mostly personal projects. I primarily use a Surface Book (Work computer), MacBook Pro and a PC I built myself that runs Windows 10. I'll most likely start a personal project on my PC, and continue on my MacBook if I want to work on it somewhere else, like a coffee shop.

Developers should consider working at Microsoft because the things that were mentioned above, and also because they are interested in solving a lot of interesting problems. Because it's such a large company, it's likely there's at least one problem that a developer would find and love solving here. It's also telling that a lot of the employees stay for many years here, 10-20+ years long. My favorite thing is the ability be to remote. While not every team is set up for it, it's nice to have a work environment that works for me, and done well to where I don't feel in a vacuum. My least favorite thing is filling out forms/surveys/reports, a necessary evil, it's probably a personal problem :)

+1 to Jeremy's answers, specifically setup. The most interesting thing I learned about recently is you can create a complete CI/CD pipeline with Azure DevOps Projects with very minimal setup.

Not an area of expertise for me as well, but I would say based on the customer stories alone, I would say they're pretty serious.

There are MANY reasons I can think of but here are my top 3: .NET Core is Cross platform: write .NET where you like it and with the tools you love Languages: C# has a lot of support, but are you interested in a functional approach? Check out F#! Open Source: about 50% of contributions to Core are from the community, you have the opportunity to alter the future of the technology For beginning devs who want to learn, I'd say start small. There's SO MUCH information out there so it can be very overwhelming on learning where to start. When it comes to learning .NET, If you're an instant gratification person (like me) I'd say start here

I'm looking forward to watching how cloud computing impacts the gaming industry, so I think I'd branch out there.