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Xamarin In Action
Over the last few months, Jim Bennett (Xamarin MVP) has been busily writing away on his first book - Xamarin In Action for Manning publications. Manning is a pretty serious publisher; they count Jon Skeet amongst their authors so it's quite an honour to be asked to write for them.
The first three chapters are now available to buy under the Manning early access program - under this program, you buy the book and get the first chapters now, and the other chapters as they are written. You also get to engage with Jim and give feedback him on the book to help make it better for everyone.
NEWS
Xamarin for Cordova – a bizarre idea?
Not so bizarre; one of the biggest problems with Xamarin in my eyes is that there is no good migration path from brownfield indigenous applications. Xamarin want's to the application/appshell instead of a binary which would be executed by the existing application (a migration wedge).
Announcing Visual Studio “15” preview 5
Visual Studio is now less painful when drunk. Watch the before/after comparison video showing the performance improvements when loading a solution with 178 projects. WOW. So, so much better.
TLS 1.2 comes to Mono
The master branch of Mono now has support for TLS 1.2 out of the box. This brings TLS 1.2 to Mono on Desktop/Unix/Linux in addition to Xamarin.{Mac,iOS,tvOS} which were already enabled to use TLS 1.2 via the native Apple TLS stack.
LEADERSHIP
Phil Haack on Moving from Engineering to Management
In this podcast, Wes Reisz (QCON) talks with Phil Haack (Engineering Director at GitHub) about Phil's transition from engineering into management. Haack joined GitHub in 2011 and is a prominent member of the .NET community. At Microsoft, Phil invented NuGet and was core to shipping ASP.NET, MVC.NET.
PERFORMANCE
Optimising LINQ
What’s the problem with LINQ? As outlined by Joe Duffy, LINQ introduces inefficiencies in the form of hidden allocations. Now clearly we could manually re-write any LINQ statement into an iterative version if we were concerned about performance, but wouldn’t it be much nicer if there were tools that could do the hard work for us? Well, it turns out there are!
ANDROID
Improving layout performance on Android
Tomasz Cielecki has written up an excellent guide on how you can improve the performance of your Android application by reducing GPU overdraw, which is how many times the same pixels on the screen are drawn per frame.
WINDOWS UNIVERSAL
MVVMCROSS
.NET

What is .NET Standard? Immo & Seth on Channel 9
Seth Juarez (Channel 9) had the privilege of joining Immo (MSFT) in his natural habitat to get all of the details behind the new .NET Standard Library, the one library to rule them all.
NUGET OF THE WEEK
richardszalay/mockhttp: A testing layer for Microsoft's HttpClient library
MockHttp is a testing layer for Microsoft's HttpClient library. It allows stubbed responses to be configured for matched HTTP requests and can be used to test your application's service layer.
AND FINALLY...
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