Welcome to 2018, or as we call it 20Great-teen! We're starting the year off with a bang by discussing our respective holiday experiences, the month of Veganuary, while touching briefly on feminism- not to mention just a bit of flirtation that comes up. Our special guest star this episode is 'the post Christmas retail plague'- featured as Katt's sniffling and coughs. #20greatteen #youremytype

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Both Danny and Motz snuggle up at home playing board games while they wait for the New Year ball to drop. Motz has a grand adventure attempting to find his long lost checked bag all while Danny tries to figure out how to interview chess players.

Links:

• 2017 Speed Chess Championship Schedule, Results, Information - Chess.com

Happy 2018! We made it, so let's recap the best in tech, development, life, coffee, and so much more that happened in 2017. We expose our top picks of the year and of course what we are looking forward to in 2018.

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Links:

• Xamarin Live Player - Xamarin
• Onewheel // Future Motion
• iPhone X - Apple
• Introducing VSTS Mobile App Tasks Extension for iOS and Android - James Montemagno
• My Top Nintendo Switch Games & Accessories - James Montemagno
• Nintendo Switch™ - Official site – Nintendo gaming system
• Frank & James are creating Merge Conflict Podcast | Patreon

In this holiday special we thank our listeners by getting to all of your great questions that you have been asking about python, Visual Studio, DevOps, and so much more. We discuss our holiday hacks that we plan on doing this year along with how we have fallen in love with .NET Standard's new auto NuGet packaging.

Sponsored By:

• Syncfusion: Syncfusion offers the largest selection of controls for .NET MAUI, Xamarin, WPF, Windows Form, Win UI, Flutter, Blazor, ASP.NET Core, and more! Check out our components on NuGet and don’t forget to download their free e-books.

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Links:

• Wilderness Labs
• praeclarum/Ooui: A small cross-platform UI library that brings the simplicity of native UI development to the web
• Build Your Own Continuous Integration Pole
• Introducing VSTS Mobile App Tasks Extension for iOS and Android - James Montemagno
• aloisdeniel/Standard.SpecialFolders: Just listing all .NETStandard special folder paths.

Vegan + Non-vegan = ? On this episode you'll find our answer to the equation of relationships between vegans and non vegans, some shout outs to those allies (and just all around good people!) in our lives, some advice on general relationships, and the introduction of Porg. Side note: Go see Star Wars.

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Surprise! We are going to Disneyland! Well Danny is literally at Disneyland for this special holiday episode! We discuss Disney magic, roller coasters, how Motz still hasn't seen Star Wars, and the delicious taste of hotel coffee.

When having SQLite isn't enough for James he has to go and try to solve offline data caching again with Monkey Cache. We discuss why this open source library happened, where it is going, what are best practices for data caching, and so much more. We also follow up on Ooui's status and where Xamarin.Forms on the web is going as well as a bit of follow up on C# 7.1/7.2/8.

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Links:

• James Montemagno 🙈 on Twitter: "What library should I use for my Xamarin apps for caching web request data for like 24 hours? Minimal dependencies if possible no RX stuff!"
• akavache/Akavache: An asynchronous, persistent key-value store
• NuGet Gallery | MonkeyCache
• jamesmontemagno/monkey-cache: Monkeys in Barrels, the best way to cache data!
• Added an abstracted Monkey, an in-memory Monkey and an eating Monkey by dersia · Pull Request #1 · jamesmontemagno/monkey-cache
• Xamarin.Forms BugSweeper - Ooui Samples
• Premium Beard and Moustache Products by Can You Handlebar – Can You Handlebar Moustache and Beard Co.

That is right, we are back at it again with more AlphaZero machine learning madness. That isn't all though as Motz hits up the local laser dome, Danny has to make hard cuts, and Star Wars is coming to town.

Links:

• Stockfish (chess) - Wikipedia
• (1) AlphaZero vs Stockfish Chess Match: Game 3 - YouTube
• AlphaZero vs Stockfish Chess Match: Game 5 - YouTube
• AlphaZero vs Stockfish Chess Match: Game 8 - YouTube
• AlphaZero Vs Stockfish: Hammer Discusses - YouTube
• AlphaZero vs Stockfish Chess Match: Game 9 - YouTube
• AlphaZero vs Stockfish Chess Match: Game 10 - YouTube

Have you ever thought about coding to a live audience? How about producing video content such as How-To guides? We discuss what goes into this long process, what equipment is needed, and several tips and tricks on this week's podcast.

Sponsored By:

• Syncfusion: Syncfusion offers the largest selection of controls for .NET MAUI, Xamarin, WPF, Windows Form, Win UI, Flutter, Blazor, ASP.NET Core, and more! Check out our components on NuGet and don’t forget to download their free e-books.

Support Merge Conflict

Links:

• Open Broadcaster Software | Home
• Ecamm Movie Tools | Ecamm Network
• Video editing and screen recording Software | Telestream ScreenFlow | Overview
• Video Editor & Video Editing Software | Camtasia | TechSmith
• Episode 5: MVVM & Data Binding with Xamarin.Forms | The Xamarin Show | Channel 9

In Episode 3 we ask the important questions...Do you have to break up with your favorite vegan brand if they're bought out by a big omni company? Is Ruffles the new enemy of tofurkey and vegans everywhere? As well as the most important question of all...where is our pumpkin pie? In the end even if you make a decision that's "against the vegan rules"- we support you! You CAN sit with us!

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