First, please read here for information on regular expressions. It’s worth learning.
You can use this:
Regex.Replace("This is a test string, with lots of: punctuations; in it?!.", @"[^\w\s]", "");
Which means:
[ #Character block start. ^ #Not these characters (letters, numbers). \w #Word characters. \s #Space characters. ] #Character block end.
In the end it reads “replace any character that is not a word character or a space character with nothing.”