GETTING STARTED
It was the best of frameworks, it was the worst of frameworks
According to the Stack Overflow survey, Xamarin is a most loved (49%) AND most dreaded (51%) framework. That's kind of interesting and in this piece José gives his opinions why this might be so.
CODE
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Service Locator
Ahh, ServiceLocators... Love 'em or hate 'em, people have opinions. Scott Hannen weights up some pro's and con's and lets you know it's okay to not hate them (with some caveats).
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Service Locator by Scott Hannen
DESIGN
Mobile Patterns
A design inspirational library featuring the finest UI UX Patterns (iOS and Android) for designers, developers, and product makers to reference.
Notifications done right
Notifications are anti UX. They are a distraction. So how to design your notification so that it becomes purposeful and useful?
There have been a few interesting articles regarding notifications over the past week that you should check out if your mobile application uses notifications:
BUSINESS & MARKETING
How to Game the App Store
Nobody is suggesting you should be trying to "Game the App Store" but there are some tricks that various developers have used. David Barnard, highlights some of those tricks.
How to Game the App Store by David Barnard
TOOLS
How to use Charles Proxy in Xamarin to capture network traffic (including SSL)
Capturing network traffic between your application and your server is a handy way of checking and debugging the data you are sending and what comes back from the server.
How to use Charles Proxy in Xamarin to capture network traffic (including SSL) by Diego Ponce de León
Tizen development on your Mac (Xamarin.Forms)
Gerald walks through some struggles to get your Tizen environment configured on a Mac. If you are looking at doing some Tizen, this could definitely save you some time.
Anatomy of Code snippets in Visual Studio for Mac
If you don't use code snippets, or create your own to make your life easier, you probably should. Here is a breakdown of how to construct your own Code Snippets.
Anatomy of Code snippets in Visual Studio for Mac by Evgeny Zborovsky
ANDROID
Create a tasty Snackbar in Xamarin.Android
Snackbar provides a non intrusive way to notify a user about something. It can also be used to initiate an action with a clickable button on the snackbar itself. Snackbar is a really useful and effective material design UI element.
SNACKBAR – Quick Tutorial (Xamarin Android) (Code) by Matej Rešetár
IOS
Introduction to ARKit
At the Queensland C# Mobile Developers meetup group's final meetup for 2018, Ryan Davis gave a talk on ARKit - Apple's Augmented Reality (AR) - framework for mobile, ARKit, and how you to use it with Xamarin.
XAMARIN FORMS
UWP MaxLines and IsPassword bugs in Xamarin.Forms
It's always interesting to read the successes and challenges of people contributing to the core Xamarin.Forms code base. Gerald is definitely one of those people. (The community thanks you!). In this article, he talks about a couple of issues he fixed regarding UWP.
Build Your Own In-App Developer Options
Alex Dunn shows how you can add in some "Developer Only" options into your forms applications to help you with testing and debugging your apps.
Xamarin.Tip – Build Your Own In-App Developer Options by Alex Dunn
Updating your Prism.Forms App to Prism.Forms 7+
Well, it’s been a while since Brian Laguna’s and the Prism team released Prism 7 and I’m finally getting around to updating some of my old projects. Prism 7 comes with some neat new features, but also carries some API changes, so if your existing Xamarin.Forms application is on an older version and you want to update to the latest, there will be some leg work involved. In this post, we’ll explore how to migrate from Prism.Forms 6.x to 7.
Updating your Prism.Forms App to Prism.Forms 7+ by Joe Meyer
MessagingCenter – Xamarin.Forms
The MessagingCenter in Xamarin.Forms allows you to send messages from anywhere in your code and respond to it in another part of your application (could be your shared code or your platform specific code). In this article, Juliano shows a simple example of creating a little platform-specific popup using the MessagingCenter.
NOTE: Post is in Portuguese
NUGET OF THE WEEK
Introducing SwipeCardView 2.0
The awesome SwipeCardView has been updated to Version 2.0 with lots of new features and improvements. If you are looking for a control to do swipeable "Tinder" style layouts then this is just awesome.
Introducing SwipeCardView 2.0 by markolazic
PODCASTS & VIDEOS
Xamarin Show - How to Create and Manage Your Own Android Emulators
In this Xamarin Show we take a look at how the new simplified Android device manager works enabling you to create and edit new and existing Android emulator images.
How to Create and Manage Your Own Android Emulators by James Montemagno
Merge Conflict 125 - Getting Fancy With Bluetooth Low Energy
Bluetooth is everywhere! What is Bluetooth Low Energy? Why does it matter for mobile devices and IoT devices and what can you do with it? We cover all of this and so much more!
AND FINALLY...

Congratulations
Some big celebrations around the community...
Javier Suarez Ruiz, a long time contributor to the Xamarin community is joining Microsoft
Not to be outdone, awesome Xamarin community leaders Charlin Agramonte and Rendy Del Rosario are getting hitched. Congratulations!!! All the very best from the community!