Karl Seguin

Karl Seguin

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  • Moving and Moving

    A little while ago I decided to move my blog to openmymind.net . I owe a lot to Brendan and CodeBetter, but I have an itch to talk about a broader set of topics than what I feel is appropriate here. I'm also becoming increasingly disenchanted towards MS and .NET and I know the constant nagging is...
  • Contributing to OSS, a Git Bootcamp

    So you want to contribute to an OSS project, but its hosted on github and you don't know where to start. This guide will cover the basics you'll need to get contributing - something made relatively easy by Git itself. First you'll need to install a Git client. We'll be using msysgit,...
  • NoSQL For The Rest Of Us

    No one would blame you for strictly associating NoSQL with performance. Most of the back and forth about NoSQL - an umbrella term given for non-relational storage mechanisms - has squarely put the focus on performance, sites with massive traffic, and server farms. It’s an interesting conversation...
  • MongoDB, 5 characters, and a free job board

    Today I came across shapado.com - a StackExchange-like open source system running on ruby and mongodb. It took a couple clicks and a few keystroke, and I had http://jobs.shapado.com/ setup and running for free. It was a quasi joke at first, but I figured it might be helpful to get this up and running...
  • Unit Test the Behavior, Not the Implementation

    As you write tests, you'll often come across situations where the code which exibits a certain behavior is different than the code which causes the behavior to exist. Consider a simple case in Metsys.Bson - a BSON serializer. You can configure the serializer and deserializer to use a different name...
  • Metsys.Bson - the BSON Library

    Earlier this month I detailed the implementation of the bson serialization we used in Norm - the C# MongoDB driver. I've since extracted the serialization/deserialization code and created a standalone project for it - in the hopes that it might prove helpful to someone. If you need an efficient binary...
  • ASP.NET Performance Framework

    At the start of the year, I finished a 5 part series on ASP.NET performance - focusing on largely generic ways to improve website performance rather than specific ASP.NET performance tricks. The series focused on a number of topics, including merging and shrinking files , using modules to remove unecessary...
  • WebForms vs MVC (again)

    There's a new video up on www.asp.net which aims to help developers pick between ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC. The video boils down to 5 benefits per technology which Microsoft thinks you should consider. Let's go over the points, shall we? First, ASP.NET WebForms: 1 - Familiar control and...
  • The 8th Phase

    I once posted a semi-serious post entitled The 7 Phases of Unit Testing . The phases are: Refuse to unit test because "you don't have enough time" Start unit testing and immediately start blogging about unit testing and TDD and how great they are and how everyone should do it Unit test...
  • BSON Serialization

    BSON is a binary-encoded serialization of JSON-like documents, which essentially means its an efficient way of transfering information. Part of my work on the MongoDB NoRM drivers , discussed in more details by Rob Conery , is to write an efficient and maintainable BSON serializer and deserializer. The...
  • I don't like MSDN

    I've long held that Microsoft could do better with its developer-focused sites. It isn't a topic I'm likely to let up on, but today I wanted to look at a specific example. I was reading the PostgreSQL documentation on the ALTER INDEX command, and was generally pleased with everything about...
  • An introduction to iptables

    iptables is a linux application that allows you to configure the built-in linux firewall. There are abstraction layers built on top of it, including nice GUIs, but I recently had some very basic rules I wanted to implement, and figured I'd learn how to do it directly in iptables. It turned out to...
  • Beyond web.config

    I recently needed a configuration mechanism which would detect changes without requiring an application domain restart. I also wanted to move away from XML. This is what I came up with (and hopefully I'll get some helpful feedback). First, we declare a ConfigurationData object which holds our actual...
  • Don't Use Try/Catch

    Exception handling has been talked about a lot over the last decade and a half. However, despite a general consensus on how to properly handle exceptions, a divide on usage continues to exist. Improper exception handling is easy to spot, easy to avoid, and is a simple code (and developer) quality metric...
  • The WebForms Rant

    Ever since ASP.NET MVC was announced/released, there's been a lot of talk about it with respect to ASP.NET WebForms. People want to know which technology they should use, and are likely confused by the fact that there isn't a consensus amongst respected developers with respect to which of the...
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