You have my sympathy for your bad feelings, but maybe all is not lost. I learned Perl before I learned C# and .Net, and maybe right now it is hard to believe but C# can be almost as much fun as Perl.

I recommend that you explore the Regex support in .Net (System.Text.RegularExpressions). You should know that it is a publicly stated goal for the .Net framework to be compatible with Perl 5 - and on top of that it adds features like named captures.

One of the things I miss most about Perl is the one-liners, but then I think I can leave this as idiomatic of Perl and be content.

I don't think your Perls of wisdom will be devoured, remind yourself that you will always know that there's another way to do things, and whenever you want you can

...while all those around you are doing

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

namespace YourCompanyName {
   class myClass {
      public static void Main() {
         StreamReader sr = new StreamReader();
         ...and on
            and on
            and on...
      }
   }
}
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