I feel like there's this stereotypical .NET dev in everyone's head on HN. Your friend, for example, didn't even know that Entity Framework was an ORM, and he likes "magic" and not understanding any lower level implementation.

That's too bad, because there are tons of sharp .NET devs who despise the concept of "magic" (and no, ORMs are not magic, and Entity Framework is fantastic) and who understand the abstractions that .NET offers. I would hesitate to write off all .NET enthusiasts as clueless less-than-hackers.

(disclaimer: Microsoft employee, nothing to do with .NET though)

One thing I find good about Microsoft's libraries is that for the most part they do a good job of working as magic and working with someone with understanding.

XNA is the example I always use. You can use XNA and make games without understanding anything about the graphics card but you can also dig in and write your own shaders and basically go however deep you want to/need to.

There are some things in .NET that do seem kinda magic, and razor is one of them. Not because it's a templating engine but just in how lightweight it is and how surprisingly decent intellisense can be with it. Most templating engines feel so verbose and ugly after working with razor.

Agreed on Razor... it's by far the best template engine I've used. It's a shame it's a bit of a pain to use outside of a web context (email templates, for example). Though I actually like using component-like systems more now (React, MercuryJS, RiotJS, Polymer...) with JS client and server.

I know what you mean, but I also think that street runs in two directions. ASP.NET was pretty late with MVC because (of course this is just me speculating) that was what those dirty Django & Rails heathens were up to. Turns out, MVC was a pretty good idea after all.

If you use ASP.Net MVC it's a lot less magic and more predictable than using webforms... That said, Razor with C# is a really nice template engine. The integration is far nicer, and more predictable than any other I've used. These days I'm targetint React under node/iojs which I would say is far more magical...

Entity Framework is also a really nice ORM for most small-mid sized projects... If you're really stuck on using a strongly-typed environment I will say that C# is one of the better ones and would choose it any day over Java (and a lot of others). My issue with many .Net and Java projects is that a lot of "enterprise" design patterns are used when they are more in the way than helpful. Abstractions are used which only improves testing or portability, but neither testing or portability are used. But this is more of a design choice from the developers than the languages/platform used.

I also disagree with your reference to .Net/C# not having a large ecosystem... There are a lot of tools for C# out there, most open-source and easily available via Nuget. Not to mention that Stack Overflow has authoritative answers to almost anything you could need with .Net or C# and has MS employees as regulars to offer support.

This is from someone who doesn't even write much C# any longer (still supporting two legacy apps in C#), and does most of his development being deployed to Linux servers.

Just because someone doesn't understand it doesn't mean it's magic.