mergeconflict230
James: [00:00:00] Frank, we made it to 230 episodes of this glorious glorious podcast. And I cannot be more excited to be here with you on this lovely, lovely evening in November. 
Frank: [00:00:19] I believe it's tradition for me to always say, I can't believe we made it this far and it's a terrible evening out there. The wind is howling.
The rain is coming down. The sun sets at 2:00 PM or something like that. Um, but it's lovely to be with you here tonight. At two 30. 
James: [00:00:37] That's correct. Yeah. So, well actually, you know, we're, we're, the podcast comes on the last day of November, which is kind of crazy. We've had our Turkey fail over here in the United States while at least for us, we just go to whole foods and get a two person Turkey meal.
Frank: [00:00:50] That's what we do. That's that's the winning move that other people do the work for you. 
James: [00:00:56] It's very true. Yeah. And I don't have to do anything. We we've. We have done, I've done the turkeys in the past. I've done all the things with the problem is. No, they're too big. There's only two of us. We don't need that much Turkey.
Frank: [00:01:05] Yeah. Actually traditionally I would always buy like a little chicken or something with like me and my roommate, because yeah. What are you going to do with a Turkey? Eat it for a month. Those things are huge. 
James: [00:01:16] That's very true. And, and, you know, it's only good for so long, but let's get into it. Frank. It is episode two 30, which means it is lightning topics.
If you were a brand new listener to this podcast while you were in for it, and we appreciate you being here with us. And of course, don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast app. All right. Lightening topics, we do every 10 episode, or we take topics from you, our listeners, and we do five minutes.
Sprints, basically, we were inspired by these lightning topic conferences we used to go to and there's really fun. And we decided to incorporate them in the podcast because there's so many great things and we always don't get a chance to cover them. Um, so that's what we're here to do today on merge 
Frank: [00:01:57] conflict.
I'm excited. These are always the fun ones. Uh, I always say it's a little bit more work, but it's also the fun ones, because if I talking up a terrible storm, you cut me off at five minutes and I love having that little counter. So this is, this will be fun. And I think we have some, uh, good topics, a little bit of feedback from last episodes.
A little bit of follow-up. So I don't know when should we get started? 
James: [00:02:23] Let's do it right now. And let's talk about the topic that is on everybody's mind. Because last week on the podcast, we talked about running iOS apps on the  Apple, Silicon devices that were just released. And I believe Frank, you have an official update for us because as soon as the podcast came out, everyone was like, does it work?
Does it not work? How does it perform? And you started tweeting all of these photos about it, Frank. So give us the update. 
Frank: [00:02:48] Yeah. So after that podcast, I think it was evident that I had no idea what I was talking about and that I didn't have an actual M one chip to, or computer to test all these apps against.
And it turned out James that the D K could not run apps off of the app store. So I was in this little bit of a predicament and I decided I, I just can't stand not knowing. And I decided to spend the big bucks I bought. The absolute cheapest laptop, not laptop. I got the Mac mini M one from the Apple. Uh, and I did my best not to spend a lot of money, but it was still $700.
James: [00:03:30] Yeah. Did you buy this version of it because it was the cheapest you want to save money or was it because it was the only thing that was available? 
Frank: [00:03:38] Uh, correct on both accounts, if that's possible. Uh, yeah, there was quite a delay. The big delay happened when you tried to get 16 gigabytes of memory that put things off until about Christmas time.
So I wasn't going to be that patient. And the whole point was I wanted to be inpatient. So I, uh, the baseline models fortunately are easily available. And here in Seattle we have. Crazy delivery services. So I was actually able to get it overnight and it was there on the portion of the next day. And the very first thing I did was download every single one of my apps that I hadn't taken off of the app store.
Cause we talked about it last time that you have the choice of whether to sell your app on max, your iOS app on max. And, uh, I started with your app. I started with Island tracker and it worked perfectly good job, James. 
James: [00:04:28] Thank you. Yay. Those key chains worked all that magical work. And my favorite part about this is that I think it looks great.
I tweeted out some photos to it and I like the dimensions. I don't know if you can expand it to make it bigger, or if it's locked in at a certain resolution, but at least the default that you showed, it was sort of a four by three box, which is sort of. In-between iPad and iPhone, I would say. And it looked really cool.
My favorite part was the dialog box because it had the app icon and the little UI alert view. I thought it was neat. 
Frank: [00:04:59] Yeah, that dialog box. It's the new alert box. It's getting a little bit of flack ongoing because all the text is centered and people are like, what are you doing? Centering texts. I think the dialogue looks great.
I don't know. Especially like you said, because it has the icon at the top and it turns out those windows are really easily resized. And these apps, your app. Uh, resize fluidly, uh, high frame rate really well. It's nice. And you know, you did zero work for that, so good job, Apple. 
James: [00:05:30] Thank you. How about your apps?
Because you actually have, what, two versions of ice or in the apps, or how did that go? 
Frank: [00:05:35] Yeah, super confusing. Um, so I enabled it so that I could download it because I really wasn't sure. Uh, it turns out it works. I'm going to, I'm going to give it a, B a B minus, maybe because there are some clunky parts of the UI because I circuit is a file based app.
And for that reason I use like the UI browser, what's it called? Whatever document browser or something like that. And, uh, so the, the, the. You're a fresh install. New user experience is a little bit rotten, but the moment you get like a circuit up, everything works great. And high frame rate animation. The simulation engine is running really efficiently knocking it out of the park.
It's. It's running far faster than it's ever run before. So a little bit of UI clunkiness that I want to work around and improve, but otherwise, like fundamentally the app is working fantastically and I think I've said it before. I'm happy to go fix those little UI clunkiness things because, uh, they should be easy.
Very 
James: [00:06:38] nice. Yeah. I saw in the screenshot that you showed me that in the app store, it says Mac apps and then iPhone iPad apps or something. How does that, how does it distinguish between the two. 
Frank: [00:06:47] Yeah, it's a little odd. They give you two tabs and that happens a little bit buggy. In fact, if you scroll poorly, one of the tabs disappears, but say you searched for ice circuit by default.
Uh, there is a Mac version of the app and that's what the app store will show you. But then there'll be a little tab there that says I phone and iPad apps. You click that tab and it shows you search results for. I found an iPad. So it's pretty simple in that regard, I'm a little nervous about it being a tiny bit hidden because it shows you Mac apps.
First. How many people are going to click on that second tab, but that's UI store stuff that Apple can work out. 
James: [00:07:31] Uh, that is Apple encouraging you to create a catalyst app. Um, that is what they did. Remember if they did this on the iPad, when you go to iPad and if you're not a universal app, it will show up as iPhone apps, any separate tab, encouraging you to create a universal app.
So I see what Apple is doing here. So Frank, since we're out of time, What are you going to do with your apps? You're going to keep them, you're going to leave them. What's the 22nd breakdown go. 
Frank: [00:07:53] Uh, five of my apps made it through my QA testing. Uh, those are good to go. Two of them, I'm going to work on and improve and get them back up continuous in particular, the IDE I need to do a little bit of work, but overall I'm very satisfied.
So I'm going to try to get most, if not all of them up. 
James: [00:08:11] Beautiful. So if you've already purchased one, a Frank's app, you will be able to not give him more money, but don't worry because I mean, that's the reason why you would do it, right? Because they already bought the iPhone app. Now they get to there.
However, Frankie, you just got a huge raise, a 15% raise. 
Frank: [00:08:25] Actually the way the numbers work out, it's a 21% raise. So yeah, I know math. Um, so what's happening here. Apple usually takes 30%, uh, from, I always get gross and net backwards, you know, Apple takes 30% bottom line from your. From your monies. So your revenue and it's been like that pretty much since the app store started, there were some exceptions.
If you had subscriptions that like lasted for a year or something like that, you could get a 15%, um, rate, but Apple, the benevolent dictator that they are as decided that all purchases, if you are a company that. Revenue profits, a million dollars or less in a year. The following year, you will get a 15% rate, uh, which gives effectively a 21% raise to every app developer out there.
Because most of us aren't making a million dollars a year. 
James: [00:09:26] That's awesome. I mean, I think this is one of the biggest steps. I believe that Microsoft may have made some adjustments here and there. I know Google made some adjustments whenever Apple sort of pushed forward, but this is one of the biggest steps forward.
This obviously does not fix Epic's problem of their in-app purchases. I believe they should may. They may make more than a million dollars. I'm just going to assume, but for everybody else, this seems. Relatively fantastic. Or at least for the first million dollars, give you a little cut there. Uh, this is, this is amazing.
I think that this is to me one of the first times that I feel really great about, you know, putting my apps into the apps are we we've always complained about the 30%. Maybe we'll start complaining about the 15%, however, you know, that kind of really. When you tear down the numbers, if it's 15% or 20, 21% bonus, now you're looking, if you're upset dollar, you're getting 85 cents on the dollar.
Like that's, it's, it's a lot closer, like something in your mind with math numbers, you know, like eight is a lot closer than two to 10 than seven, even though they're one difference in your mind, right? You're like, Oh seven. Oh. But you know, if you're at, if you're at. Eight. You're like, Oh, I'm a mine might as well be 10.
You know, something like that in your mind works that way. So this is fantastic. Now, is it, are they retroactively giving you money from the last year? Uh, 
Frank: [00:10:44] no, that is not correct at James. So this should all kick in. If you qualify in January 1st, I think Apple does their own fiscal year. That happens to be the calendar year.
So I think that's how that's going to work out. And it does create that weird slop, but we can all make jokes about now. They've incentivized. Not making a million. You want to like give your app away for free toward the end, if you're, if you're near that number. But the truth is if you're making a million dollars a year, you're doing absolutely fine if you're not running your company poorly or anything like that.
So this is a really, um, I made fun by calling them, uh, Benevolent dictator, but it's a really savvy move on their part. A lot of times when you see discounts like this, like you see wholesale discounts. If you buy one of the part 10 of the parts, 10,000 of the parts, if you buy 10,000, you get the lower price.
And that's usually how I think that's how Microsoft first did. It is like, if you, if you sell a bunch and make so much money, then we'll decrease the rate. This is kind of the opposite. This is really throwing money into the long tail by saying, no, we're going to. This is like a progressive tax. We are going to, uh, taxi less.
The less you make. You know, it's, it's a more fair system because it encourages the underdog to come in. If you're making a million dollars, hopefully you'll be just fine. But for all of us, this is a big sigh of relief, especially the number like 10 to 15%. Those are like standard tax rate kind of numbers.
You know, that's like an excise tax. That's like a sales tax. It's really easy to swallow a 10 to 15% because if you run a business, you've run into people taking 10 to 15% from you all the time. So it just feels like a more comfortable number. 
James: [00:12:27] I have to imagine that somewhere Apple, somebody was like, Hey, if we make less money on this thing while to pay less taxes and.
Vice-versa funnily enough, now you will be making more taxes or more money, Frank, which you will have to now pay more taxes to the federal government. So they're going to get your money no matter what. Um, that's the flip side of it. 
Frank: [00:12:50] Thanks James. I really appreciate it. That little uplifted. Now this is purely good news that you are not going to bring me down.
James: [00:12:57] No, it is good because how taxes work. I think it is perfect, right? The less you make, the less taxes you should pay, make, or should pay the more money you make, the more you're there. So like if you're in a bracket where you're getting up to that million dollars, then you're only going to get tax on over a certain amount.
And at least in the U S because taxes are crazy, but let's get on Frank and let's stop talking about taxes before everybody turns off this podcast. Let's talk about C-sharp nine, eight, nine. 
Frank: [00:13:24] Switch up nine. Well, we had the, um, official release, a dotnet five, which coincides with the official release for C-sharp nine.
Now I don't know about you, but I've been stealing a few C-sharp nine features and my apps here and there, but I haven't. I haven't gone head first into it, but now I don't know why I even care about official releases. Like who cares if it's a beta, they release good betas, but it's nice having it without the hyphen beta.
And I feel like I can properly use this language now. However, that said, that was for.net. You did something cool. You wrote a blog entry on how to use C-sharp nine in Xamarin. Tell me more. 
James: [00:14:07] Well, yes, that was very good because it goes very well with the blog post I put out last year, which was how to use C-sharp eight in Xamarin projects.
Frank: [00:14:14] Okay. Wait, wait, I want me to interrupt. So, so did you just copy and paste or did you actually have to change anything? 
James: [00:14:20] I did cause it's actually a little bit different this year for C-sharp eight, there were more new get packages readily available for some of the features they added. Now, people have to kind of understand how C-sharp works.
Most of the changes, if not nearly, all of them are compiler based changes and not necessarily runtime changes, not necessarily like usually there's not new classes, but sometimes like value tasks that was added or different to post support. Those are added later, but with Donna five and we're at least how it works is when people should have versions of the SDKs and their CS proj it basically, there's a target file hidden somewhere that says.
Hey, I'm fully compatible with C sharp seven three C sharp, eight C sharp nine, et cetera, et cetera. Now, Xamarin projects, um, iOS and Android for a while. When C sharp came out were. Only C-sharp seven, um, by default and then they flipped it over. Uh, and now the default is seizure eight. The problem that most Samran developers have is that we all use.net standard two O libraries.
And those are C-sharp seven dot three by default. That's the default version. However, you can change all of this and you can say, no, no, no. Don't use the default. That's silly. Use a specific front specific Lang version. So you can go into your CS proj, you can just set it to preview if you want, which would give you all the latest and greatest features of whatever visual studio you have or, you know, runtime you have or compiler you have, or you can just say nine dot.
Oh. And when you do that, it will automatically flip it on for that project. So the first thing I do in my. Done at standard project. As I open up CS project, I say Lang version. I think there's like latest and preview and or whatever. There's a bunch of different ones. You can read the docs, but you can just say 9.0, and then you get 9.0, almost Frank, almost.
Frank: [00:16:18] Uh, th there's a caveat. Uh, but I, I first want to say you don't even have to edit your, your project file. That's a little bit old fashioned James. I use this thing called a gooey and an IDE. And if you double click on your project, you can choose language version nine, latest, major preview, latest. But tell me what's this caveat I'm scared.
Can 
James: [00:16:40] you, I don't know if you can. 
Frank: [00:16:42] My version. I can, I just did it right now. Oh, take it away. 
James: [00:16:45] I think they removed it from visual studio on windows. 
Frank: [00:16:49] Oh, I'm on visual studio for Mac. 
James: [00:16:52] Yeah. I'm gonna have to create this and get back to you later, but anyways, you could also do that too, or as you were at one point, but maybe it is maybe I just can't see it, but anyways, that's what you do.
Um, the thing is where there were like new get packages for some of those things that I just talked about. There's a word, a weird oddity with, um, records. And some of the private in it, things that were added, which would be like the main, one of the main things that you would want to use C-sharp nine for.
So when you change your, like a monkey class to a monkey record, and you say, monkey string name, string location, you get squiggles, Frankie, get little squiggles and that's not fun for anybody. And it says predefined type system run-time compiler service is external in it is not the fine. And you're like, I guess I can't use C sharp nine and my Xamarin or Don that side under projects.
But Frank. At three lines of code and you're done, you just bring in that, do you bring in that namespace? And then the compiler is happy and you're done. Can you explain why Frank you are? You will know more than me. 
Frank: [00:17:51] Um, I'll be honest. I don't know, a hundred percent about how this thing works, but I do have a little experience with this.
So once I read your blog entry, I was like, Oh yeah. Now I remember because a couple of months ago I enabled C-sharp nine support and continuous my ID. And I compiled the program and the IDE tried to hit run and it gave this weird error about external in it missing. And I looked around and it looks like this external and net is a new feature of dotnet five new newly released, newly christened.
Dotnet five. What is it though? As far as I can tell the purpose of it is to. Create kind of a dependency tree for how to initialize assemblies and the classes with them as they are loaded. We've always had global variables with statics and such, but there was always, I don't know about you, a little nagging question in the back of my head of like, in what order are these things being initialized.
And I think with, uh, some new C-sharp nine features, they, uh, We wanted to make it more concrete and more guaranteed that things get knitted in order. And I think that that's what that class does. It's a, it's a flag kind of, 
James: [00:19:10] it's a wacky one and yeah, it's a right now, if you're doing Don a chord on a standard, on a framework, I'm done it.
Xamarin anything that's dot.net five specific. You'll have to go through this route, which is kind of a bummer and maybe. Visual studio we'll ship an updated DLL reference. Maybe they'll get around it. I don't know, but that would be ideal if they did. 
Frank: [00:19:31] Yeah, I I'm honestly a little bit surprised that they shipped it this way, because it was going to break all of us that are, that are just trying to cheat a little bit like this, but, uh, you know, version ones of products this happens sometimes 
James: [00:19:47] just to say, before we get off of this topic, is that technically the official support is the default.
So technically if I air quoted here, technically the default is actually what's actually supported, but if it compiles Frank that we're good to go. 
Frank: [00:20:00] Yeah. And it's the common language runtime, not the C sharp language run. So you don't need to change the runtime every time that language changes, but whatever, it's, it's a tiny little hack.
It's fine. No worries. Which, um, I was kind of alluding to this tiny little hack going onto the next topic. It's another, C-sharp nine topic and it's a fun one. It's one that I am both. Excited about and slightly horrified of how is that we can now write code, like if statements and variables and function calls outside of a class.
James, just, just right at the top of the fi w wherever you want in the file, you know, column zero column one, however you count your columns. You can just start writing code, uh, How do you feel about this as an object oriented person? We generally don't write these kinds of like global bits of function code.
What do you think? I dunno. 
James: [00:20:59] I mean, for me, I don't understand how it would necessarily affect me as a application, gooey developer. You know, I, I can't, couldn't really comprehend too much, I guess maybe my. I don't know, maybe my Xamarin forms app would simplify a little bit, but I don't know. That's the only thing I can't really understand it.
I think for me, what's neat about this is. The educational scenarios that are available right now, let's say you want to teach someone C-sharp um, you have to teach them all about namespaces and using statements and, and classes and all this stuff just to get started. To write code, but now you can just write code in a file and it will totally work.
And you can have classes in this other thing and, you know, in records and you can jam it all together in a file. And that I think is really cool. It could simplify that down for the educational scenarios, but I don't necessarily know like, long-term, what's the point of it, I guess maybe command line apps, but again, I'm not creating command line apps that often.
What about you? 
Frank: [00:22:07] Uh, this is exactly command line apps. I mean, you said it, this is to simplify the getting started in C-sharp scenario, which I've actually realized is bigger than I think, you know, I live in a little bit of a bubble. I've known the language for so long. I just assume that everyone knows the language.
But with continuous out there, I've learned a lot of people are learning C sharp and they're writing your very basic console, right. Line console, right. Line console, relined console, read key console write line. And if you're writing those kinds of apps, there's really no reason to get super formal about the program class or anything like that.
I don't think there are any huge advantages to that. Even the C-sharp nine blog posts called it boiler plate. They're kind of admitting that this is just kind of extra stuff, not needed here. Uh, it, it turns it into kind of scripting language mode. And I really appreciate that because. Oddly enough, C sharp has always had a scripting language mode.
It's just, people never really used it in that form. And so this is just kind of bringing out that, that scriptedness, that has always been there. So let's just make it a little more formal and let people just get to it. I like it because it just cleans up the language a bit and it doesn't really hurt anything.
So I'm, I'm here for it. 
James: [00:23:30] Yeah. The one thing that I think really blows my mind with this feature, isn't the feature, but it's how. The potential of this feature, what this feature may be com and what I mean by that is a good friend, Daniel Castellino Kazu he has a GitHub project. I think it's called like mini mini apps or micro apps or something like that.
But what he does is he has a normal C-sharp project, like a command line pro project. And what he did is he somehow hacked a visual studio. So every file, every CS file was its own app. In general. So you can have, you know, 20 files and they all show up in the debug menu. So you could run each of them or run all of them simultaneously together.
And I think that is really neat. 
Frank: [00:24:17] Yeah, that is super cool. Not the pull, the F sharp, uh, banner or flag out, but, um, we've had, uh, some version of this because I've sharp. Scripting is a little more forefront and that, but the things that we've missed are the debuggers and the finer IDE experiences. So that is a really cool.
Extension. Uh, and he's very experienced in visual studio. So I expect nothing less than that, than perfection from this, but that's super cool. I'm a little surprised I'm Microsoft and do it out of the box. Now that you say that it seems kind of obvious, but great feature. Yeah. 
James: [00:24:55] Who knows, who knows what's next for this feature?
As I said, I'm excited for the future of and see where it goes. Well, you did get a little F sharp in there because. You know, there's one more other programming language in the.net world. That's a visual basic, don't forget about VB and N um, I want to talk a little bit about VB because there was a blog post that I'll put in the show notes about sort of VBS first-class port in dotnet five in and around WinForms apps.
Don't forget that we. That there's a lot of people that use wind farms every day. There's tons, it's way more than you could possibly possibly fathom. I just released an app that was wind farms. It was fantastic. This first-class support includes all the app framework, but also all of the designers and all the things that you'd want from VB.
And I thought that that was sort of a nice, just filling out the scenario. However, I got to say, Frank. Where do you, where do, I mean, we don't have cow Kathleen dollar on which we really should to, to give, give the five minutes of VB, but where is VB in the world? And we're not VB developers, but you told me before the podcast, you just almost created a V new VB project.
So where does VB, you know, there's first-class support, which I think is fantastic. There's a lot of VB developers. When and why should people check out VB from your perspective? 
Frank: [00:26:10] Oh, you just threw me a curve ball there. I was going for a whole different one, but, uh, uh, why VB? Because VB is dynamic dotnet language.
It has the same flexibility that you get from Python and things like that, where it's not so strict. It's just like, Hey, you want to write a program? Let's run a program together. The mace, the namespace is called like my, so you say like my computer name, things like that, it was designed. For the old fashioned turn a term, rad rapid application development.
It's kind of funny that this whole announcement is kind of full circle, full circle because I started using visual studio to use visual. Basic because visual basic had the best user interface designer out there. And in some ways we haven't surpassed it even today. And it was a very productive environment for writing apps.
Sure. It was low. Sure. All the C plus plus people made fun of you, incessantly. Sure. You never knew exactly which DLLs to ship with your app to make it actually run, but you throw all those other things away. The language was. Uh, very nice. And the designer was amazing, whereas VB today, well, it's, it's definitely not as popular as it used to be.
A lot of VB programmers became C-sharp programmers, but it has a lot of benefits in my opinion, oversee sharp some of the default syntax and the examples. And I totally blame Microsoft for this. Make VB look very ugly because they're writing VB code in a C-sharp kind of way. But VB syntax is actually very succinct and can be very refined and very cute.
And it doesn't care about care about upper. Oh, actually, maybe it does maybe vb.net does, but a upper case, lower case. Maybe you can even turn that mode off. You can turn off error handling. That's how cool VB is. Like, don't you want to language? That's just like, I'm not going to be so picky. I'm just going to help you write an app.
And I think that's always what basic and visual basic have been to me. 
James: [00:28:21] Let's say you had to do it live your life. I love that you can use whatever it calls your name. And like I said, VB is, is of us. I think you're right. Like different programming languages when they're just documented, you know, they may be documented by the same person that may not be the, the, how you would, you know, take advantage of that, that language.
I haven't actually written any VB in my life. Um, surprisingly, no, and I got away from it. Uh, my first job was. All C sharp. I mean, I went to C sharp and C sharp in college. I was CBS, Boston C-sharp and I just dove in, I guess, but, um, yeah, I, I'm not against it in any way, just like I'm not against, after we talked about it, like, Hey, choose your own, your own journey, your own path, because each of them has their own advantage.
Or where were you going to go with the VB story? You said you had a different take on, on this. 
Frank: [00:29:08] Uh, no, it was just the, the pitch of why you should use it or don't use it. Those are hard arguments to make. Like for me, VB is just home. It's just happy land. Uh, basic was the very first programming language I learned.
So all I want to do is dim my variables and call sub you know, that's, that's what I think programming should be all this object oriented. It's tough. That's that's been a fun diversion, functional programming. That's cool for the mathematicians, but in the end, you just want to. Set some variables and call some procedures and that's what VB is all about.
And, um, yeah, like I said, it's a dynamic language tool too, so we don't have very many of those in.net. We have iron Python, we have iron Ruby, but those are, you know, just implementations of. Other languages, other runtime, any kind of things where VB is.net was built to run VB. So it runs very well and all that stuff.
The compiler is very good and it has inline XML. What don't you want to do in line XML? 
James: [00:30:11] I'm in, I'm in let's do it. I'm ready. Let's go create our next VB empire I'm down. Yeah. I think that it's fascinating. Every language has its own advantages and disadvantages. Right. And I think sometimes the languages and, and application frameworks can get complicated.
Right. I was reading a blog post and there was talking about, you know, when you're doing, you know, You know, windows or Xamarin or WPF developments, like there's a lot of romancing and a lot of ceremony, you got the XAML and then you got the code behind, and then you got these other files. There's all these programming languages that you got to learn.
Then you got to do this other thing, and sometimes you want to put a button on the screen and you want to click on it, Frank. That's all you want to do. 
Frank: [00:30:48] So, yeah, exactly. And, um, VB is used or basic is used in a lot of places that we don't think of the office tools, Excel. There are a lot of people that do a lot of crazy Excel programming using visual basic.
There are a lot of people using access out there that are using visual basic. So I think it's just a great gateway for people using those kinds of products to build maybe a, a Xamarin app, you know, take your, take your VB skills and apply them to iOS or something. 
James: [00:31:16] Do it all right. Let's switch course 100%.
And let's talk about chess, Frank chess. 
Frank: [00:31:22] Uh, I, I can't believe we're all. I love that the nation is talking about chess right now because it's a fun little game and I, I used to love chess, and then I got overdosed on chess and then I stayed away from chess and then I got bad at chess, so I didn't want to play chess anymore.
And then Netflix released the S. Show and I started liking chess again. And you used to have chess podcasts. I'm like, James, did you watch the show? Are you going to do a podcast about it? Tell me more, 
James: [00:31:51] James. The answer is yes, that's right. Coffee house blenders, me and international chess. Master Daniel wrench, the chief chess officer of chess.com.
He is back with me to break down every single episode of the Queen's gambit, because I started watching, like you I've been a long time chess fan. I'm not very good at chess. I have my membership@chess.com. I play a lot of games. I get beaten most of the time. Uh, I've tried to learn by listening and watching Danny, but it's, it's just sort of.
You know, someone that doesn't code that comes to a coding live stream. You're like, I kind of can follow along and understand that. Um, but when I same, they want to go to chess. Like they're speaking in chess terms and I'm learning slowly. The more I watch, the more I learn, but this is cool. I haven't finished all of it because I called Danny and we talked about rebooting the podcast and he wants to break down.
Every single episode of the Queen's gambit, all seven of them and talk about not only the life and times in the sixties and, and when this show took place. Um, and the fifties to some extent. And how does that relate to just today or is the show valid? Are there, are the moves and the openings they're showing valid or not?
Is it real chess and how have things changed over the years? Um, seeing that the show is based on a fictional character, you know, how. How did they do? And, uh, the first episode we just put out last week, I'll put it in the show notes, blenders.fm is where you can get it just type in blenders on your, on your, um, podcast app.
And we show up coffee house blenders, and yeah, we break down everything. I, I will say, um, you haven't listened to it yet because I haven't put it out yet. Um, but, um, as, as of this recording, but it. The first episode was absolutely fantastic. I've watched episode two or one twice now. And the second time watching it, it reeled me in even more than the first time.
And I took all these notes and I was pausing and I was recreating the chess moves on chess.com and I'm sucked in, man. It's so good. Um, I dunno, it's just so 
Frank: [00:33:49] good. Big hype. I wasn't sure if you were saying the first episode of Queens gambit was good or the first episode of your show was good. Okay. I gotcha.
I'm excited for this because, uh, you've been on hiatus for a bit of time with this podcast and it was always one of my favorites and I had the opportunity to meet Danny at your wedding of all places. And that was super exciting. What a fun guy. And so it's, now it's going to add like a whole nother dimension to hearing you guys talk about it.
I'm not sure I can keep up with him. Um, I got out my I w which book do I use? I have a book called like chess for dummies, and whenever I want to get good at chess, again, I reread through my chest for dummies book. And I don't think that that's going to prepare me for the, uh, did you say master grant? I don't know how the rating system works, but chessKing@chess.com like.
Oh, that's cool. 
James: [00:34:46] He's an international master. He was the youngest national master in Arizona by the age of like 14 or something like that. 
Frank: [00:34:52] Oh, high achievers. Oh yeah. 
James: [00:34:54] Okay. He's going to tell some stories, some stories when he was over in a mother country, Russia, which is, which is quite excellent to hear from him.
Um, yeah, I mean, but here's the nice thing about this podcast is this season, season one was really different than what season two's going to be on the podcast, because season one, it was me and Danny talking about chess and what's going on in the world of chess and technology and coffee stuff. And there's all this stuff.
And this one is really to the point it's, we're breaking down, not necessarily scene by scene, but we're breaking down sort of the episode into chunks talking about it. But. You know, I'm not an expert, so I'm coming in, I'm asking the questions, understanding why they did it this way. Is it realistic? You know, the, the app, I'm the avid chess player, right?
So he's the, the, the master, you know, Grandmaster not well chess international master, I guess. Yeah. So the master international master grand master, I think that's right. Then you can correct me, but international master that is going to be kind of laying down this knowledge, but he. Has to just be able to describe it to me.
Right. And make me understand because it, and he's also interested too, in how I interpreted the show. And I think this is really fascinating is sometimes I surprise him how I interpreted the chess play compared to how he interprets it. So I think there's a good compliment sorta like our podcast, where we have this great chemistry back and forth.
And I think Danny and I, we, we hit it out of the park. I think you're really gonna enjoy it, Frank. 
Frank: [00:36:22] That's awesome. There's a, there's a secondary thing that I'm looking forward to is, uh, you may not know dear listener, but James used to have an awesome movie podcast. And I used to love listening to his movie podcast.
And you guys, you got into the business side, but you also talked about plots and characters and that kind of stuff. So I'm excited to hear you talk about. Media again, honestly, I just need more James in my life. So I'm excited for that. I know you do it on the Nintendo, but I don't, I don't play the Nintendo, but I watch a lot of TV.
So this is perfect. 
James: [00:36:55] I think you may enjoy this. And I think this might be the in fact, Danny and I talked about that because on coffee, I was blunders. We would get into some of the Marvel movies here and there. And then on, on this podcast, we do kind of break down some of the cinematography. We talk about the shots, why they decided to show some things versus the other things.
And we do talk about the story. So it's not all chest, but anyways, That's our podcast this week, check out my other podcasts that I have too many podcasts, coffee house blunders at blunders RFM, or Nintendo dispatch@nintendodispatch.com or, you know, if you just like this podcast, that is good enough for me.
Um, but as long as you're hitting that subscribe button and sharing this with a friend, we would we'd appreciate that. We 
Frank: [00:37:35] love it. Yeah, absolutely. Listen to all of James. 
James: [00:37:40] How much James do you need? All of it. All right. Well, that's going to do it for, we did it. 
Frank: [00:37:43] We did it. We we've stretched out that last one, but just because I wanted to talk about that.
But otherwise I think we know that we, we did a lot of topics. Five minutes each. Lightning round success, 
James: [00:37:55] success. And in fact, yes, you can tell us what you want for episode two 40 in just 10 weeks, by going to merge conflict RFM, there's a contact button. You can email us, you can join our discord server, or you can just tweet at us.
And we keep all of those. And we put that into our little topics, Google sheets over here, and we will be talking about. Those topics maybe even before then. So head over to merge conflict at IFM, but that's gonna do it for this week's podcast. So until next time, geez, lots of Magnum. 
Frank: [00:38:21] And I'm Frank, thanks for this 
James: [00:38:24] piece.