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.

I recently had the opportunity to look into and make use of the Microsoft System.Security.SecureString class. This class is one of those dark corners of the .NET Framework that you don’t think about on a day-to-day basis but are really glad that it’s there when your security auditor starts asking questions about how PII data such as social security numbers are protected while resident in memory. The SecureString class takes care of this problem, helping you avoid a situation where unencrypted sensitive String data is left lingering around on the .NET heap. However, since this class does reference unmanaged memory buffers, its use is not entirely intuitive. I’ve attempted to demystify things with the explanation, drawing and code snippets in this post.

Everybody loves lists of tools. Scott Hanselman’s annual list of Windows tools has been immensely popular over the years and has opened my eyes to a bunch of new tools. The topic of tools has also been the subject of some very popular books, such as Windows Developer Power Tools and Java Power Tools.

These tool discussions are also recurring themes on all of the major discussion forums. It seems that every so often one of these questions hits StackOverflow and everyone chimes in with their favorite current tools. Invariably, for the .NET tool lists, there are some tools that always show up and; enjoying near universal advocacy in the .NET developer community. This includes tools like Reflector and Fiddler on the free side and Ants Profiler and Resharper on the commercial side.