My cofounders were C# guys. One new benefit I thought of recently was that C# is similar to Java and thats what mobile apps are coded apart from Objective-C. Who says the MVP has to be a webapp? :)

In anycase, my thinking was just get started first. Im probably going to dabble in Python or Ruby (probably Python) just to see what its like at some point. But for the time being, just getting my head down and writing code and asking really n00b questions on stackoverflow is definitely the way to go.

Visual studio is one of the best IDEs out there, so not a bad choice.

Just learn ruby on rails as soon as possible so you aren't tainted by the horrible sample code of c#/java/php. Ay least get into codeigniter.

If you're interested in web scraping, take a look at Mechanize (it's available for Perl, Python, and Ruby, at least, though I prefer Ruby) - it makes web scraping trivial.

Im not interested in web scraping per se but in my previous gig, I was doing erm some 'marketing' through social networks and I was frustrated at not being able to contribute more actively to the process. The marketing work was essentially a programmers job.

So its nice to be able to look under the hood now and see whats going on!