NEWS
Xamarin Challenges
Complete a mini-hack to obtain a monkey, complete all three to obtain a monkey and a Xamarin branded bluetooth speaker.
Xamarin Evolve 2016 Recap
James Montemagno interviews Joseph Hill, co-founder of Xamarin about Xamarin Evolve and Joseph's thoughts about the recent acquisition of Xamarin by Microsoft.
APP OF THE WEEK

Xactware processes 80% of U.S. home property claims, worth over $340 billion per year. Using Xamarin, Xactware mobilized existing C# code to build Xactimate Mobile for iOS and Android. Claims adjusters receive assignments, build 3D models, estimate costs, settle onsite, and instantly upload all materials for processing.
CODE

The many flavors of HttpClient
When using Xamarin, by default, HttpClient uses Mono’s complete reimplementation of the entire HTTP stack which is super slow. In this article, Kerry provides an overview of the alternative options which will make your network requests go faster 🚀
DESIGN

From Sketch to App: A Design to Development Workflow
David Ortinau reminds us that we are are all designers. When as a developer we make a decision about a color, a transition, an animation, a layout, a font, a sizing, we are designing.
IOS

Investigating the cause of O(n^2) cost when adding a subview to a view
Great article by Benjamin Encz on tracking down a performance problem inside UIKit. The problem itself is interesting (and may be affecting your apps), but the detailed walk through the investigation process is where the article really shines.
The 1st of June 2016 deadline approaches
Back at their June 2015 WWDC event, Apple announced that all iOS 9 applications must support IPv6. This week Apple declared that as of June 1 all apps submitted to the AppStore MUST support IPv6-only networking.
App Store review times are falling significantly
You can certainly see a clear trend and the recent raw data shows very few reviews taking more than a day.
iOS 9.3.2 is here, fixes iPhone SE Bluetooth problems and other bugs
Apple has released iOS 9.3.2, which is a minor update to iOS 9 that fixes a handful of minor bugs.
XAMARIN FORMS
Embedding Native Controls into Xamarin.Forms
Sometimes you just want to take a native control and place it directly into your Xamarin.Forms application. This ceremony, in my eyes, was one of the biggest barriers in recommending a Xamarin Forms based approach when working with a designer. In this article James Montemagno runs you through how to implement this recently announced feature into a shared library project.
.NET

Thoughts on project files
There was much wailing, and gnashing of teeth, and rending of clothes, and tearing of hair, and stuff on Twitter this week after an announcement in the ASP.NET standup that project.json would be retired and replaced with an XML/MSBuild combination.
Remove the cruft from project files and templates
David Kean sheds light on what the new XML/MSBuild combination would look like.
Intellisense in project files coming soon to Xamarin Studio
Miguel de Icaza delivers a gift to the Xamarin community for those mourning that project.json went to a farm to live with other json files.
.NET Core, a call to action
It's time to port your packages to .NET Core and the .NET Platform Standard: go go go.
WHO'S HIRING/LOOKING
Maintainer of ReactiveUI is looking for more co-workers
Dennis Daume is looking for developers with experience with Xamarin and ReactiveUI in Vienna, Austria. DM @flagbug on Twitter for more information.
Want to be part of defining the package management strategy for Microsoft?
The NuGet team is looking for strong engineers to move NuGet.org to the next level. DM @yigalatz on Twitter for more information.