NEWS
Apple is going to remove abandoned apps from the App Store
It’s cleaning time in the App Store. Apple will start reviewing old apps on September 7. Apps that crash on launch will be removed immediately. Other apps will get a notice from Apple first. And if you don’t update over the next 30 days after the 7th of September, your app will be removed.
Beta preview 3, Cycle 8 released
The Xamarin team is looking for as much user feedback as possible on these Cycle 8 Beta versions, especially for the iOS 10 and Xcode 8 features. If you see a behaviour that looks suspicious in these versions, and if it isn’t clear whether one of the known issues in the release notes matches the problem, please file a bug report.
CODE
You're using HttpClient wrong and it is destabilizing your software
Are you wrapping HttpClient in a using clause? Whoops. HttpClient is reentrant and thread safe. Instead of creating a new instance of HttpClient for each execution you should share a single instance of HttpClient for the entire lifetime of the application.
Singleton HttpClient? Beware of this serious behaviour
Using a singleton based HttpClient matters, especially when it comes to the performance but once instantiated DNS changes are NOT honoured and HttpClient (through HttpClientHandler) hogs the connections until the socket is closed. Indefinitely. Bet your thinking DNS entries don't change that often. Wrong, everytime you do blue-green deployment (in Azure cloud services when you deploy to staging slot and then swap production/staging slots) or change settings in your Azure Traffic Manager the underlying IP address changes. Are you sending traffic to the wrong server?
DEVOPS
The conclusion to "How do we prevent Addin's becoming stale?"
The cake team are going to start suggesting to maintainers of Cake addins and modules, that are published to nuget.org, to add the cake-contrib user as a co-maintainer of that package. They are not attempting to throttle or take over the development of Cake addins/modules in any way. cake-contrib is a dead-mans switch to ensure the health of the community incases where a maintainer rage quits oss/dotnet development.
ANDROID
Custom fonts in Android made easy
Using custom fonts on Android is not the most straightforward task. The Android layout XMLs does not offer any way to add custom fonts by default. So, we need to either create custom TextViews or set the font in code. Both methods have significant drawbacks. Subclassing is restrictive, and if you already have a reasonable project size, then subclassing becomes prohibitive. Setting the font from code is error prone and slow; editing the font means Android needs to remeasure the view, at worst this may mean that Android will remeasure every other view on the screen. It's a bag sadness, this is unless you use Calligraphy.
Transitions in the Android Support Library
Google has finished a back-port of the "Scenes & Transitions" API which means the capabilities of KitKat transitions are available all the way back to the Ice Cream Sandwich release. That means that you are now able to change your UI’s layout and use the transitions system to animate those changes automatically on devices back to API level 14.
IOS
Xamarin iOS AutoLayout cheat sheet
Apple iOS uses a layout system based an absolute position called AutoLayout. Unfortunately, the implementation is not intuitive and is a common source of confusion to those new to iOS development. Kevin Ford has put together a fantastic cheat sheet/guide that explains the AutoLayout designer differences between XCode and Xamarin iOS.
XAMARIN FORMS
Underlined Label Text in Xamarin.Forms
Problem: The FontAttributes API contains only None, Bold and Italic but you need to underline your text. Here, Sven-Michael Stübe demonstrates how to do this using the behaviour and effects API. I'm kinda surprised that underlined text isn't baked in actually - good idea for a PR to send into Xamarin.Forms if you are looking for a way to start getting involved with open-source.
Demo app featuring both Xamarin.Forms and native approaches to Xamarin development
Xamarin has released a simple app named Acquaint. The application is a simple list of contacts, each of which can be viewed in a detail screen and modified in an edit screen. It runs on iOS 9+, Android 4.2+, and UWP (mobile and desktop).