Lucene + Blazor, Part 5: Highlighting
In this final installment of my Blazor + Lucene.Net series, we'll be adding highlights for the search terms found in the header and body text of each of our results. The implementation of highlighting makes use of the Lucene.Net.Highlighter library, plugging this library into a simple method that can be used as a filter for search results to highlight key terms.
Lucene + Blazor, Part 4: Faceting
In this fourth installment of my Blazor + Lucene.Net series, we'll make the most significant updates to the classes, search function and UI to date. Facets enrich the query responses, enabling users to further tune the search results along specific, pre-defined vectors. The implementation of facets uses the Lucene.Net.Facet library to implement an additional faceted index over two attributes -- Scholars and Universities -- which are applied on top of the WaffleText class and data.
Lucene + Blazor, Part 3: Auto Complete
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!!
Lucene + Blazor, Part 2: Results Paging
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.
Lucene + Blazor, Part 1: Basic Search
Lucene.NET is a C# port of the Java Lucene search engine library. Lucene.NET provides robust search and index capabilities enhanced by a wide array of support packages (e.g. auto-suggest, faceting) that enable the creation of robust search facilities within .NET applications.
Dotnet Lightweight Databases
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.
Early Tech Publications
In porting my blog to Statiq, I was forced to revisit a whole lot of content, most of which is more than a decade old. As part of this review, I cleaned up old broken links, of which there were many. I would estimate that 60% of the web links I had from my original blog pages were to sites or content that no longer existed. This says a lot about how the web has evolved and how much content turns over as time progresses.
System.Security.SecureString
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.
Team Foundation Server Project Archiving and History
One of the things I was really eager to do was help one of our clients manage the archival and history of projects within their TFS repository. Historically, VSS volumes sizes have gotten out of control over time, resulting in commensurately poor performance. Obviously, a SQL Server backing database offers lots of advantages over the Jet database engine but even SQL Server performance will degrade over time as the history volume in long-running projects backs up.
Top 5 .NET Developer Tools You Likely Never Heard Of
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.