NEWS

Xamarin has released .NET Standard support to the Stable channel
.NET Standard is a formal specification of .NET APIs that are intended to be available on all .NET runtimes. You can think of it as a simplified, yet expanded, Portable Class Library. It is a single library with a uniform API for all .NET platforms including .NET Core. You just create a single .NET Standard library and use it from any runtime that supports the .NET Standard platform.
Organically grown, continuous and fresh builds for Xamarin.iOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS now public
You can now download Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Mac packages directly the Xamarin build bots. They are provided as-is and no QA or other validations were done on those builds (e.g. builds that failed internal tests are also published)
Preview #2 of iOS 10 / Xcode 8 / macOS Sierra support now available
Xamarin has released a new set of preview builds with support for Xcode 8, iOS 10, watchOS3, tvOS 10, and MacOS Sierra. NOTE – These builds have been tested against Xcode beta 3 and beta 4.
Preview #3 of iOS Simulator for Windows now available
Xamarin has released a third preview of the iOS Simulator for Xamarin.VS which provides you with a way to test and debug iOS apps on the simulator entirely from Visual Studio on Windows.
mkbundle just got better
The mkbundle
tool in Mono has been updated, it no longer requires an installed compiler and can now cross-compile an . NET application into a native binary for a different architecture than you are currently running on. i.e. x86 can produce x64 binaries.
CODE
The unrealistic expectation of total transparency in open source
The glimmers of glamour usually only sparkle around release time, but the grunt of the grind is daily. The grind is an endless stream of bug reports, requests, demands, questions, and occasional inquisitions. Doing the work of justifying choices, presenting arguments, and collaborating on code in public is great for transparency, but also at the heart of why the work is so draining.
DEVOPS
Announcing Cake.Raygun
Objective-C debug symbols (dSYM) are essential to debugging Xamarin iOS application crashes. This Cake add-in uploads these symbols to Raygun.io which creates delightfully readable stack traces which aid you in tracking down those bugs.
How do we prevent Cake Addin's becoming stale?
There's a great discussion going on in Issue #1136, and we would love your feedback.
IOS
Interface Builder is much less likely to modify documents on open
Interface Builder is much less likely to modify documents on open, prior to any user events or manually saving. Oh, Xcode.
You can now use one set of screenshots for all languages and devices
Finally! Apple no longer requires you to create hundreds of screenshots for each device, unless you want to. You can now specify one set of device images & preview video and have them displayed for all devices and localisations.
WINDOWS UNIVERSAL
Windows 10 Anniversary Update SDK now available
Microsoft has released the Windows 10 Anniversary Update SDK, build 14393 along with Visual Studio 2015 Update 3. The new SDK contains more than 2700 enhancements to the Universal Windows Platform.
x:bind : ... death to value converters has begun
Starting in Windows 10, version 1607, {x:Bind}
supports using a function as the leaf step of the binding path.
XAMARIN FORMS

Add Orange color to Color - Issue #290
Parkinson's law of triviality almost came out to play in this pull-request where the community and a Xamarin employee debated what colour orange is. Honestly, it looks a bit reddish to me, but who cares?
Formatted textboxes with Xamarin.Forms
Antonio Feregrino Bolaños demonstrates how to create a formatted textbox that will automatically convert user input from an integer number to a string formatted comma separated number, i.e. 1234567 becomes 1,234,567 automatically.
Creating animations with Xamarin.Forms
In this blog post, David Birch (Xamarin) explores creating and cancelling animations using the ViewExtensions
class in Xamarin.Forms to create compelling animations that run on iOS, Android, and Windows.
Composable customizations with Xamarin.Forms
Greg Shackles demonstrates how to use the Behaviours and Effects API's in Xamarin.Forms to customise your application without having to use custom renderers.
REACTIVEUI
ModernHttpClient, Refit, Akavache, ReactiveUI, Splat and Fusillade meeting minutes
Back in July, the core maintainers met in virtual space to discuss and plan the future of the projects. Here's the meeting minutes.