If I'm trying to do one thing, and a whole new tech tree, completely alien to me, spirals out of it, it's possible I'd be overwhelmed.
Your suggestion of Mono goes the right way, I think: using a familiar language in an unfamiliar environment could help with the initial confusion.
Hahaha, someone should definitely draw a Civilization style tech tree for a whole lots of things.
Yeah but if the environment setup takes 3x the time of the project it becomes less fun. I had this experience when trying to log temperatures to InfluxDB for use with Grafana.
I did learn something doing this DIY project. But at the end of the day there is also the question of whether I enjoyed using these new tool, and I am afraid that I have done all the CRON editing I could stand.
I also looked at commercial alternatives but I wanted it to call one of my web services and that's not what these IoT devices typically do.
PS. and you can apparently use .NET on Linux anyway (Mono) - here's an example of interfacing with I2C sensors: http://blog.mshmelev.com/2013/06/connecting-raspberry-pi-and...