NEWS
Introducing .NET Standard
Immo Landwerth (MSFT) has written up the definitive post which contains everything you need to know about .NET Standard:
- .NET Standard is a set of APIs that all .NET platforms have to implement. This unifies the .NET platforms and prevents future fragmentation.
- .NET Standard 2.0 will be implemented by .NET Framework, .NET Core, and Xamarin. For .NET Core, this will add many of the existing APIs that have been requested.
- .NET Standard 2.0 includes a compatibility shim for .NET Framework binaries, significantly increasing the set of libraries that you can reference from your .NET Standard libraries.
- .NET Standard will replace Portable Class Libraries (PCLs) as the tooling story for building multi-platform .NET libraries.
- You can see the .NET Standard API definition in the dotnet/standard repo on GitHub.
Xamarin vs. Native
Colby Williams has written up the definitive explanation that clearly and concisely explains that mobile applications written in C# using Xamarin are native - just as native as iOS apps written in Swift or Objective-C, and Android apps written in Java.
CODE
How to make your code sustainable - what they don’t teach you
An entertaining talk from Christin Gorman on the dangers of over-engineering. Yes, it's a talk about Java for the web, but the concepts are still relevant.
ANDROID
Awaitable Animations on Android
Xamarin has done a great job on bringing async/await to animations on iOS but on Android, this isn't the case. This extension method by Sven-Michael Stübe brings async/await to your animations on Android.
IOS
"I'm an idiot for not using SimPholders"
Most sophisticated iOS applications require the ability to be able to save something to the device’s storage and at times you'll want to verify that stuff is stored in the right location. Verification was painful; that is until I found out about SimPholders, an application for OSX.
XAMARIN FORMS
The Xamarin Show Episode #3
On this week's The Xamarin Show James Montemagno takes a look at some of the top tips and tricks to create highly performant mobile applications with Xamarin.Forms.
REALM

Real-time sync added to Realm and internals open-sourced
Realm has launched a new server-side offering that integrates their client-side database for iOS and Android that provides realtime synchronisation, conflict resolution, and reactive event handling. Additionally, they have open-sourced the client-side database implementations.
.NET
I Can Has .NET Core
Upload your project's packages.config, project.json and paket.dependencies files for analysis and the brains from Octopus Deploy will build you a visualisation of the packages and whether .NET Standard versions are available on nuget.org.
WHO'S HIRING/LOOKING
Xamarin are hiring in APAC/ANZ
Xamarin are on the hunt for a Xamarin Technical Specialist Professional/Engineer to support their Consulting Partners in APAC/ANZ. DM @epolzin on Twitter for more information.