Okay I went a purchased an Arduino to have a play with it. Glad I did, I've ported all my code, got the ds18b20 chip working straight away and I'm not looking back
From what I've found.
- Arduino IDE is much much lighter weight than visual studio. Seriously the number of hours I've spent downloading various VS updates, running firmware upgrades on the Netduino and then finally not even able to use the ds18b20 chip is crazy. What a waste of time.
- Arduino IDE works great on the Mac! Woo, I no longer need to use bootcamp just to write a few lines of code.
- Cheaper! The Arduino is cheaper.
- More reliable. .net web server would crash every few days on the Netduino for no reason, the board itself is fine (my code was still running) but the web server would stop listening on the network.
- VS is much slower compiling code, always waiting.
- Arduino has heaps more documentation and a larger community.
- Lower power usage chips/boards if needed.
Honestly there is no downside to switching to Arduino for my needs, I'm much happier with it.
The Netduino 3 is just more expensive and not actually any better for my needs (uses more power, more expensive and WiFi isn't useful for what I want).
The Netduino looked like a really cool platform, but after using the Arduino there is just no reason to use Netduino.
If I need some more processing power I'll go get a Pi 2 or Chip computer running full linux.
Bye guys!