Beckshome.com: Thomas Beck's Blog

The code and code narrative below reflects the changes that have been made on top of the first 4 posts. All source code is available online for this highlighting post.

In this third installment of my Blazor + Lucene.Net series, I’ll start tackling some advanced Lucene functionality, namely auto-complete. For advanced Lucene work, the most important lessons is don’t roll your own functionality. If you go to the docs for the Lucene.Net API, you’ll see that a ton of additional functionality is built into Lucene via modules. Modules exist for faceting, highlighting, spatial search and autosuggest, amongst others. Lots of the examples and StackOverflow answers are roll-your-own solutions – don’t do it!!

In the first installment of this series, we looked at returning results from a limited pool of items in a Lucene full text index. In this second installment, we significantly increase the number of generated items (3,000, by default) and add a numbered paging system, as used by the main commercial search engines and search sites.

The code and code narrative below reflects the changes that have been made since the first post. All source code is available online for this results paging post.

While useful and recent tutorials exist on using Lucene.NET in a command line context, there is a dearth of tutorials on using Lucene.NET in a web context, especially with the current Blazor framework. This tutorial fills that gap, with this existing article being the first in a series that will illustrate the buildout of a Blazor-based search site.

My popular dotnet-blazor-crud project has long used the EF Core InMemory database provider for data persistence. While this hasn’t caused me any issues – ever, I’ve been aspiring to move to a relational database versus an in-memory provider. SQLite is the obvious contender here, without going to a full out-of-process database. Getting started with SQLite and EF Core is pretty easy. The real question for me was how much work it would take to swap out the in memory provider for SQLite.

According to the definition on the Mermaid site, Mermaid is a JavaScript based diagramming and charting tool that renders Markdown-inspired text definitions to create and modify diagrams dynamically. In short, when creating online Markdown-based documentation or publications, like with GitHub or with static site generators that use Markdown to generate content, you can move from static images to dynamically generated diagrams. Mermaid currently supports diagrams such as flowcharts, sequence diagrams, class diagrams, ER diagrams and Gantt charts with more diagrams being added.

After 7 years of being dormant, the beckshome.com blog hummed back to life over the past month. It started with a full .NET hosted blog, moved to Wordpress and then was exported from Wordpress to create static content in 2015, which is where things stood for the past 7 years. I decided to go with a static site generator to modernize the site, specifically with Statiq, which is a .NET-based static site generator.

• Docker – O’Reilly released an awesome Introduction to Docker video. Total runtime is less than 2 hours. Definitely a recommended watch if you’re looking to get familiar with the Docker container. Free to those who have an O’Reilly Safari subscription.
• Azure VM Images – Microsoft announces a host of Azure Virtual Machine Images for Visual Studio. A great way to get exposure to the other Visual Studio SKUs or run the newer versions of VS without having to deal with the headaches of an install.
• App Development – Awesome article on how independent mobile app development works and can be quite lucrative.
• Feature Toggles – Good course from Pluralsight on implementing feature toggles in .NET. Something architects should be aware but the process and patterns are not widely documented.