>>55447
I'd unironically suggest going to C# (12), and .NET 8. It's widely used in the industry and its syntax might be familiar to you. Just remember to enable nullable context. That way, you'll get the compiler to help you avoid the blasted Null Reference Exceptions.

And look up Entity Framework Core as well. It's a database framework that supports many different database providers. So if you don't want to bother setting up something like PostGres, you can just configure it to go with SQL Lite as its InMemory provider. It's created in a way, where you can in theory just substitute the database provider with something else, and all the code you've written, won't have to be refactored.
Of course there are behavioral difference, so in practice, you might have to refactor some parts.