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DDD Melbourne (Australia) is back on again, and the call for speakers is now open. The conference will run on Saturday the 13th of August, but the last date for submitting sessions is on the 5th of June.
NEWS
Join the Xamarin Team for dotNetConf
June 7 marks the kick off of dotNetConf, a free, annual virtual event focused on all things .NET and C#. With three full days of awesome content, dotNetConf is the perfect place to discover everything .NET has to offer, including many exciting sessions on developing mobile applications for iOS, Android, and Windows with Xamarin.
Making it easier to port to .NET Core
Immo Landwerth (.NET Program Manager), has written a blog post explaining the roadmap of .NET core, announced that GetType() is coming back and that how in the future all high-level communications and announcements will now happen via the blog, rather than Slack. Discussion of implementation details will still occur on GitHub issues within the corefx repository.
CODE
Why does C# use UTF-16 for strings?
In this oldie but a goodie from 2014, Eric Lippert reflects on why UTF-16 was chosen as the defacto standard for .NET over the more traditional UTF-8 or UTF-32 formats.
DESIGN
Design with me: Filter Designer Mac App Icon
Want to spend 13 minutes watching Michael Flarup design an icon for a Mac App? I did, and really enjoyed it.
DEVOPS
Cake has added debugging support!
Cake is Xamarin HQ's (and my) personal choice for build automation with .NET projects. One of the biggest issues I've always had with Cake was the lack of breakpoint debugging and an inline REPL which means that often you'll need to do printf debugging. In this merged pull request, Martin Björkström has added support for debugging!
Getting started with Xamarin DevOps on VSTS
A great introduction by Richard Woollcott explaining how to setup a DevOps workflow from start to finish using Visual Studio Team System.
IOS
BWWalkthrough ported to Xamarin by Marc Bruins
BWWalkthrough is a class that helps you create walkthroughs for your iOS Apps; BWWT is just a layer placed over your controllers that give you complete freedom on the design of your views.
Objective Sharpie 3.1 released
ObjectiveSharpie has been updated to support the new CocoaPod's format.
WINDOWS UNIVERSAL
Images and Effects
Robert Mikhayelyan, from the Windows User Interface (Composition) team, introduces you to the Image and Effects API.
XAMARIN FORMS

Xamarin Forms UI snippets
Two awesome guys from the Netherlands have launched a neat little website called Snppts that contains (re)useable UI designs for Xamarin Forms.
Xamarin.Forms has been run through a static analyser
Sergey Vasiliev from PVS-Studio has taken the opportunity to run Xamarin.Forms through their static analyser and has written up his findings.
REALM
Introduction to Realm DB on Xamarin
In this 5 minute video, Ben Bishop runs you through the fundamentals of what Realm is and an overview of how structure your application architecture when using Realm.
Gone Mobile 33: Realm with Tim Anglade and Kristian Dupont
This week on the Gone Mobile podcast Greg Shackles and Jon Dick interview, interview Tim Anglade and Kristian Dupont of Realm.
MVVMCROSS
MvvmCross bootstrap released
Jim Bennett has released an add-in for Visual Studio and Xamarin Studio that allows you to shake and bake a Mvx based project in next to no time.
.NET
C# 7 language feature status
Want to know what has made the cut? This markdown document on GitHub is the roadmap for C#7 and VB15.
WHO'S HIRING/LOOKING
Android Course Authoring Opportunity
Pluralsight is currently looking for individuals to develop and teach online technical courses to subscribers around the world. We are specifically looking for developers with relevant Android knowledge, passion and experience.
Define the tooling for the next generation of Windows application development
The Visual Studio, universal windows platform tooling team, is looking for an excellent program manager to help define the tooling for next generation Windows applications. DM @unnir on Twitter for more information.