Back when ReSharper was first released, it basically advanced VS to the point that was considered essential baseline by most Java developers.

As I recall, at the time, it seems that the Java ecosystem was mostly investing into writing code and declarative markup (usually XML), while Microsoft was most interested in visual designers and other ways to help devs on its platform avoid writing code. Thus, VS was far easier to get started with, but advanced coding was much better in Java IDEs.

It's funny, post 9-11 I was pretty down and out for a year or so post-dot-com etc. I learned C# using the command line compiler and the complete reference book in 2001-2002. No IDE at all, and building with BAT/CMD files.

I don't think the tooling caught up to the ease of not using the built in tooling until VS 2005 for me. Of course by VS2012, it felt like such a bloated slow mess, I don't think I've looked back much until relatively recently. Been doing a lot of Node work, which I tend to think of as very low friction.

These days, I absolutely love VS Code which tends to strike the balance of more than an editor, but not slow and bloated like a typical IDE. Integrated file tree + terminal are the best UX to me.

Microsoft also pushed for their version of markup (wpf + xaml)

You may mean partial classes or generics... it's had static classes since the beginning IIRC.

Source? In release notes of C# 2.0 one of main new features is support for static classes.

Oh.. okay, you are right... but I'm pretty sure you could create a class with all static members before that designation.