What Are Your Most Popular Dev Kits or Reference Design Kits?

For me, the popular ones, especially for rapid prototyping, are those that have standard layouts as Arduino Uno and work with an IDE compatible or similar to Arduino IDE. In this respect, historically I have used different types of Microchip PICkit boards with mpide, GR-Sakura board with  Gadget Renesas Web compiler, and finally Arduino Uno with Arduino IDE.

Pickit in the wild

Great tour to watch! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L99cNecjzY0 

my favourite is one that can run RTOS and comes with a lot of common connector and peripheral. RTOS wise, i like RT-Thread. Now i like the board named RT-Thread HMI board, which is powered by Renesas RA6M3, comes with ethernet, wifi, arduino header, pmod, can and a 4.3' lcd screen

Selection of Dev kits purely depend on the projects.

Low power Cortex M : STM32F0 dev discovery board.
High power Cortex M : STM32F7 dev board.
Integrated Wireless (Wifi/Bluetooth) : ESP32-WROVER-DEVKIT
Integrated bluetooth : nRF5340 / nrf7002DK

(Note : Some arduino boards for short time for proof of concepts) 

More processing power with Linux OS:

Beagle Bone Black

RPi 4

Edge AI?ML inferences 

Nvidia jetson nano

I'm not sure I can put my finger on a "most popular" as it all depends on what I'm trying to achieve.

TI's MSP430 line got me into microcontrollers so I'll always have a soft spot for those. I dipped into Nordic's nRF series for work - I was creating a stand-in for another company's hardware and decided to use the same base for my mock device. I've been a bit on-and-off with those but might well pick that as a go-to if I needed a microcontroller for a project, Either that or a Pico.

The Raspberry Pi is always good if you need an SBC to run Linux. My team at work are mostly Microsoft based, but .NET Core runs really well on a Pi. However, having to design some new hardware when the Pi was hard to get meant the BeagleBone Black got the job. They're great in certain situations too. (If you're a golf fan and you watched the Ryder Cup recently, it was some BeagleBones that the marshalls were using to switch the enormous on-course video screens between the scoreboard and TV feed.)

Whilst I was getting into FPGAs, the Xilinx (now AMD) range were great.

None of these would be good if you picked the wrong one for the job. A microcontroller, SBC and FPGA are all so different.

I miss content and challenges with TI development boards on element14. I also got into modern microcontrollers with a TI development board, the ARM Cortex-M4F Based MCU TM4C123G LaunchPad Evaluation Kit with which I took the course UT.6.02x Embedded Systems - Shape the World by Jonathan Valvano and Ramesh Yerraballi: https://users.ece.utexas.edu/~valvano/Volume1/E-Book/

This was my final project:

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I then followed the TI Robotics Systems Learning Kit (TI-RSLK) courses with the TI MSP432 LaunchPad: https://university.ti.com/en/faculty/ti-robotics-system-learning-kit/ti-robotics-system-learning-kit/curriculum-design-launch

I also have several TI MSP430G2553 LaunchPad from when my eldest daughter was studying digital electronics with the MSP430 in PDIP package.

I have left these development boards aside because I follow what element14 sells. Now my interest is focused on FPGAs and Arduinos.

Interesting that you use .NET Core. It is not something that comes up much on Element14. So I stick with Linux OS.

I have always wondered if any .NET developers use these SBC's and what they're like: https://www.ghielectronics.com/sitcore/sbc/

I recall their early FEZ dev boards, but they never gained traction in terms of popularity stakes (although I see they have newer options on the website).

I used the .NET MicroFramework in the past and TinyCLR on the Fez seems similar. It was a fun way in to embedded for me at the time, but I wouldn't recommend it now.

.NET Core on Linux works really well - whether it's on a Pi, BeagleBone or desktop. There are NuGet packages for using GPIO. You can always call into Linux C libraries if you need to, but it's a bit more complex.

I've recently written code for a touchscreen controller for use in conferences. It has an Electron front end and C# behind. It will run just as well on a Pi with a 7" touchscreen or a Windows PC with a 14" touchscreen monitor. Genuine portability of the code between the two.

I also run .NET Core apps on Raspberry Pi, but in case of ASP.NET Core webservers I was facing out of memory on Raspberry Pi 3. Now with 4B with 2 GiB and more RAM it is not problem anymore.

.NET Micro Framework was my begining with IoT. Sadly, the project died. Microsoft currently works on AoT compiler for .NET which may be possibly used in future as a come back to embedded world but as I understand, it is not priority for Microsoft.

Yes, I remember .NET Micro Framework but never got to try it.

I have yet to work out the value of using .NET apps in light of Python offering so much more these days. I therefore see .NET as more application specific in terms of a use case.