Better late than never!
Just finished what I had to do for university, so I am joining my first LD 
The frameworks of my choice:
- C# / .Net 4.0
- SharpDX to access DirectX 11 (probably DX10-level hardware support)
- BepuPhysics – Awesome .Net physics library
- Some DX initialization- and buffer management code I can fork from another project
My tools:
- Visual Studio
- Sublime Text 2 (for HLSL shader code)
- 3ds-Max
First up: Create a tiny planet (a sphere), get the character controller to work with the planetary gravity and – maybe I should begin here – write a shader so I can see the planet.