As I continue my introspective end of the year thoughts I am reminded of a request from a buddy: start blogging my recipes. If you’ve ever looked at the Flickr stream over on the right hand side of the current blog layout, you may notice that a lot of the pictures are of food. I assure you I’m a much better cook than photographer. While many of the things I make come directly from Cook’s Illustrated or Food Network, some are my own creations. While this hardly fits with the technology focus of my blog, it’s who I am.
So, my amigo in Nashville, this is for you.

Braised Beef Short Ribs with Malbec Gravy

This recipe uses classic French techniques to produce tender meat and flavorful sauce.

* 4-7 beef ribs, trimmed of excess fat
* Two tablespoons of unsalted butter
* Two medium onions, diced
* Four cloves of fresh garlic, minced
* Fresh thyme
* 1 heaping tablespoon of unbleached all-purpose flour
* 1 tbsp tomato paste
* Kosher salt
* Fresh-cracked pepper
* 4 slices of thick cut bacon
* Two celery stalks, sliced thick
* Two large carrots, peeled and sliced thick
* Two bay leaves
* 14-20 ounces of crimini or button mushrooms
* 2 cups of beef broth
* 1 bottle of Malbec

Pre-heat your oven to 300.

Allow the beef ribs to come up to room temperature and sprinkle with Kosher salt. If possible, allow them to rest on a wire rack for up to 1 hour before cooking. While the beef rests, pour the Malbec into a saucepan and reduce until it’s about 1 cup; this may take around ten minutes.

 Cut the bacon into ¼” pieces and brown in an oven safe saucepan or searing pan, a Dutch oven will do in a pinch. If your culture forbids the eating of delicious swine, skip this step and use 2tbsp of vegetable oil instead. When the bacon is browned, remove it from the pan with a slotted spoon and set aside. Depending on how fatty the bacon was you may wish to remove some of the rendered fat from the pan at this point. Season the beef ribs with pepper and sear on each side for about 1 minute over high heat. Remove the ribs and set aside.

Add the onions and brown until soft and translucent, this make take up to 8 minutes. Add the garlic and briefly cook until fragrant, around 30 seconds, be careful not to burn the garlic. Now add the flour and mix with the onions. Cook until the flour is browned, maybe as long as 2 minutes or so.

Side note: Why add the flour at this point and brown it? Many soups & sauces start with a base mixture called a roux, pronounced “roo”. A roux is often as simple as vegetable oil and flour cooked until the flour is copper colored. When flour is manipulated in this manner it forms gluten proteins, and some of it will stick to your pan. This is the good stuff that will make for thick, hearty sauce later on. This will also mean you won’t have to add flour later or do as much reducing to get the sauce to the consistency you want. You can skip this step and use a little corn starch later to make this gluten free.

With the flour browned, pour in the beef broth to deglace the pan. Make sure to scrape the pan diligently to remove anything that’s stuck to it: that’s the goodness. Turn the heat to high and add the carrots, celery, bay leaves, thyme, reduced Malbec, bacon, tomato paste, and bay leaves. Once the mixture is simmering, nestle the beef ribs in the pan, cover with foil, put in the oven and cook for a long time. I suggest at least four hours, but you can check for desired tenderness at any point after an hour.

Once the ribs have reached the desired tenderness, remove them from the sauce, turn off the oven and let them rest in there on a pan. Pour the sauce mixture through a strainer into a bowl to remove all the solids. Wash the mushrooms, halve or quarter them, and sear them briefly in the original sauce pan.  Add the strained sauce back in and cook over high heat until the mushrooms are tender and the sauce is reduced to your desired consistency. Add the butter and whisk to combine. You can pour the sauce right over the ribs, I myself tend to serve this with mashed potatoes and parsnips.

Let's think about some industries in the age of the Internet:

Newspapers
Music.
Movies.
Real Estate.
Publishing.
Retail.

The way we’re doing things now are profitable, proven, known, safe, comfortable.

What Year Is It?

So What Should Retail Do?

It’s been quite a long time since I’ve written any new Silverlight code. Reduced solely to its core suite of technologies, Silverlight is certainly still as cool as it was two years ago. I am probably not alone, though, in claiming that I see less and less interest in Silverlight as time goes by.
In my opinion, Steve Jobs killed the browser plugin ecosystem overnight with his anti-Flash rants and refusal to give Flash a place on the iPad. We are living in the renaissance of the front end web developer. To a large degree, I don’t mind this. It’s been years since jQuery took a way a great deal of the pain of Javascript, and projects like Foundation are taking away the pain of CSS. No, we’ve come a long way since my days of pre-Ajax hacking with posting-back hidden iframes. Sure, a type system would be a huge boon to larger in-browser efforts, but maybe TypeScript will save us.

Assimilate or Perish

There are other reasons why people began to drift away from Silverlight, of course. Microsoft, too, didn’t help matters. Microsoft has a lot of means by which it interacts with people and companies using its products in interesting ways: The MVP program, TAP programs, early-access programs, Insider Programs, Metro (not the UI framework) programs, and I’m probably forgetting at least six others. The companies and people that participate in these programs gain the ability to influence products but also a huge head start at building knowledge which is a nice competitive advantage. If your company decides to use a new feature of SQL Server, would you rather hire a consultant who’s been influencing the product under an NDA for a year, or someone who just got access at the same time you did? For this reason, there’s a very large community of people and companies for whom it pays big to align with Microsoft, lock step.

An investment in Silverlight may not quite seem like it belongs in the same category as, say, betting your business on SQL Server, but there are some additional factors. As I am fond of saying, when you choose a technology platform, you are also choosing the community behind that platform. If something like Silverlight is perceived as being on its way out, will you attract career-conscious engineers to work with you by espousing it? If you depend on your relationship with a giant vendor like Microsoft and they are shifting their direction in a particular area, hadn’t you better shift as well or risk losing their attention and good will?

Is that my cheese over there?

My programming career has seen me through BASIC and Pascal, through Solaris, Windows NT, and Mac OS X, through C# and PERL and, SQL. I never considered myself a “Silverlight guy” but rather a lifelong polyglot and ever-learning student. My public identity, though, was very much tied to things like Silverlight.  This is, in great part, responsible for my “dropping off the grid” for the latter part of 2012. True, I was also growing weary of the type of sessions user groups and code camps seem to want, but more on that later.

While the technical merits of Silverlight remain true, the marketplace of ideas seems to have moved past it. In fact, if I had to explain why I think a technology gets adopted, I think I’d say something like this:

Many of these aspects are related yet distinct. Marketing can include things like Hype (Everyone is on GitHub and StackExchange writing Python now!) Mandates may mean something like forcing developers to learn Objective-C to take advantage of the Opportunity represented by the iOS marketplace.

The small glimpse of the obsolescence that comes with betting on the wrong horse left me in a funk for a while. I went into maintenance mode and didn’t innovate much for quite a while as I cast about looking for where I would invest my energies next. More on that later too, but I believe I’ve found a basket of things to start talking about. While for a while it seemed there was nothing in Microsoft DevDiv with so much momentum as Silverlight, life goes on. Software is still eating the world. It’s a great time to be a software developer, adapt and carry on.

I’m having as much fun as I ever have.

Cheers,

Damon

Lately I've been playing a bit of Guild Wars 2. By "a bit", I mean a little more than is healthy given how much other work I have going on at home. It's much less severe than my previous Diablo 3 addiction, but that's like saying I kicked the crack habit and only do morphine now. At any rate, I got to a point the story that seemed unpassable due to app crashes. This was incredibly frustrating because each retry took at least 10 minutes. Each time I sent technical information about the error to the game's creator, and on my last crash I looked through it myself.

TL;DR - don't expose technical details like call stacks to your users.

The non-gamers will have to bear with me for a moment.

The crash happened at the very end of the story event, while my character was using a trebuchet. When you use a trebuchet, the game camera stops following your character and takes up a fixed position relative to the trebuchet. Upon nailing the last bad-guy, a scripted story dialog would start and the game would crash.

The technical information contained in the error report wasn't precisely a stack trace but it was pretty close. The sequence of calls seemed to be encountering an issue looking for a "bone" that didn't exist, so I assume the game is using skeletal animation. There was also some vague items about camera attach, camera follow, and so forth. Figuring I'd use this knowledge to my advantage, I tried the event one more time only this time exiting the trebuchet while the last shot was in-flight so the camera would be following me when the automatic dialog started. Sure enough, I got through the event without crashing.

Popular games get hacked often enough. Web sites get hacked. Bad things happen. This time a gamer got past a bug by inspecting a call stack, but next time someone could create something that ruins characters or steals financial information.

Think about the ways you may unintentionally expose technical details of your software.

I have had a long time interest in Machine Learning. I can trace this mostly back to some influential people in the Metro Milwaukee area who are, as nearly as I can tell, no longer blogging. I had written a few simple things in the past, but wanted a more formal education, so I went old school and started buying books. The first one I picked up is this one:

While I don't know Python, I figured I could pick it up easily while I read the book and learned the more common algorithms. In a way, I was right. Except for some interestingly terse syntax in the Python math libraries it's easy enough for a C# developer with experience in other languages to follow. The way the author has chosen to structure data, though, makes for some brain-twisting translation issues. Lists-of-lists-of-trees-of-dictionaries-of-lists-of-matrices* might be easy to type into Matlab, but it makes for a poor mental model when attempting to describe and understand new concepts. The book has been very useful, however, and I've gotten through k Nearest Neighbor, Decision Trees, and Naive Bayes classifiers so far. I intended to keep reading the book, but also to supplement it with other material to in case I need a reality check on any algorithms in the future.

Also, in a post in the near future, I'll show the model I've developed to work with this kind of data.

* That would be List<List<Node<Dictionary<int,List<Matrix<double>>>>>> in case you were wondering. And, yes, I'm being a little unfair but hyperbole is fun.

I have not taken the longest break I've ever taken from blogging since I started in 1998.  This is partly due to some fun things going on in my personal life. This is partly due to fatigue.  This is partly due to a sort of "Technology identity crisis" as I wondered what was next for me. I'm not apologizing for not blogging, but I'm happy to say I have a new direction I'm heading in and it's extremely exciting. I haven't had a lot to say lately, and I haven't been contributing noise because of that.

This weekend I'll be presenting on WinJS and HTML5 development at the Fox Valley Day of .NET in Appleton, WI

Do you want to build native applications in JavaScript?  The HTML5/CSS/JavaScript stack shown at Build 2011 caused quite a ruckus within the .NET and Web Developer communities. We won’t talk about Plugins vs. HTML5 too much, but we will take a hard look at how well WinJS delivers on the promises of re-using Web Developer skills for Windows 8 and making JavaScript a first class citizen in the Windows 8 ecosystem. Come to this session to explore common smart-client application techniques such as control/UI, navigation, data-binding, service consumption, and more.  XAML developers looking for a peek at the dark side are welcome.

I hope to see you there!

If you're interested, there is also a day long HTML 5 and Azure boot camp coming up too.

While I don't blog or tweet about it much, I'm a gamer.  I like games.  A lot.  I'm a one-game gamer: I tend to play one game exhaustively until it loses its appeal or I've accomplished most of what I wanted to. Being one of my favorite leisure activities, this hobby tends to get in the way of productive work. When I get home and sit down at my workstation it's way too easy to click the Battlefield 3 icon instead of the Visual Studio icon.

Diablo 3 Comes out May 15^th

In terms of my historical game addiction a few titles come to mind: Final Fantasy 7 for the original Playstation nearly ruined a semester of college.  Diablo 2 was an utterly obscene time sink when it came out so many years ago. I've been obsessively following the development and recent release date announcement for Diablo 3, and I have to admit I'm worried. You see, I have kids now. There's a lot going on this year and I can't just drop off the map for long enough to get my initial fix. I must, therefore, maximize my productivity between now and May 15th.

I hereby swear, before these internets, that I will play no video games until the midnight launch of Diablo 3.

Like many people, I grabbed the Windows 8 Customer Preview yesterday.  I decided, since I'm at a conference right now, to try to Live in Windows 8 and VS 2011 for the rest of the week until Monday. 

Installation over the top of the Windows 8 Developer Preview from build was quick and painless.  I chose not to log in using my Live account as I don't trust it yet (more on this choice later) and get some basic apps installed such as Metro Twit and Paint.NET.  Generally speaking, I like the look and feel of Windows 8 so far and it seems to run as well as the Developer Preview.  As a keyboard guy without a touch laptop I'm finding things like this article from Tim fairly helpful.  I'll be writing seperate articles on other aspects of Dev 11 and the apps that ship with Windows 8 Consumer Preview as I get time.

The first rule about the MVP Summit is that you do not talk about the MVP Summit...

I'm back in the Seattle/Redmond/Bellevue area for the 2012 global MVP summit.  Obviously what goes on out here is under NDA so I can't blog about it.  There's a lot of reasons to come out here every year: interact with the Microsoft teams who build the tools I use, connect with other MVPs I might only know through Twitter or their blogs, and recharge.

Here in the afternoon of the first day, I'm already feeling a little more myself.  Conferences like this carry a huge benefit that it's hard to put a price tag on: a chance to step back and reflect, and get re-enganged in your career and your love of technology.  I'm hoping for some serious reduction in Burnout this week, wish me luck!