Jason Starr

You will find that the transition from Java to C# is pretty smooth. Working with .NET has become much more intuitive and has a lot to offer. I highly recommend using Visual Studio as your IDE. It makes things much easier and is not too different than other IDEs like IntelliJ. There are also Visual Studio templates for web APIs that make it really easy to get up and running. Microsoft has good documentation and tutorials to help you get familiar with the technology. I would start there.

Creating a reliable, scalable app quickly has become much easier and more straightforward. The Microsoft extensions of the runtime libraries make implementing dependency injection, configuration, and logging very convenient and reduces time spent writing boilerplate code. LINQ makes working with data a breeze especially when you have data coming from a variety of sources. Although Entity Framework Core can be a bit much and takes some time to get used to, I think it is a great ORM overall and has a lot to offer. Possibly my favorite part of building .NET apps is the deployment options available. Deploying an app as a single-file, self-contained, executable has been a luxury when deploying to machines without .NET Framework installed and/or installing the latest version was not an option. Single file deployment bundles all application dependencies and the framework into a single executable. The only other file that needed to be distributed was the appsettings.json file. Hosting the app in a Windows Service is cool and definitely beats working with Task Scheduler. It's clean and simple, which is a nice break from the norm.

It really depends on what you plan to develop and the IDE you plan to use. Here are a few points worth mentioning:

• Kotlin is generally better for mobile application development. Most documentation you will find for android development will use Kotlin.
• C# and ASP.NET is better for web development
• C# is a Microsoft product so Visual Studio is better for C# programming
• JetBrains designed Kotlin so IntelliJ or Android Studio is better suited for Kotlin programming
• C# is more commonly used for Object Oriented Programming
• Kotlin has better support for Functional Programming
• Both support asynchronous programming, but I would argue Kotlin has better built-in support

Overall, both are great languages and have tons of applications. I picked Kotlin because it is more concise and efficient language, but that doesn't mean Kotlin programs will inherently be more efficient and performant. I would say if you are wanting to learn just for personal projects and such, Kotlin is probably the way to go. If you are learning to get a job as a developer, C# would be best. Once you learn the basics of programming, you will find that learning new languages is not difficult. So whichever you decide to go with, spend time understanding programming concepts more than just the language itself.