1) Start a project in Xamarin (which uses C#).
I have to disagree with this, i know you had a bad experience, but the tooling and integration with VS has improved massively since MS took over Xamarin. Also there is quite a lot of content on Xamarin that there wasn't before including a ton of stuff on youtube.

Also the debugging process has got immeasurably better. I pretty much only debug straight on to a device now and its quick and simple to do.

I actually find the Xamarin development now one of the most enjoyable things i do at work.