Anyone who has done any serious work with any ASP.NET based framework will know that page output caching is a great feature. For those not familiar with it, the basic premise is that it makes sure that the generation of content is done only once for a set of parameters, and that all subsequent requests with the same …

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Updated 25/02/2012 - it was highlighted that some of the seach phrases used towards the end of this article were not returning the expected results - that was down to me making assumptions about which words would be stemmed - these examples have been updated. This tutorial will take you through an end-to-end …

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If you create a new MVC application and try to go down the Code First with SQL Server Compact route, you might encounter this error when you first start the application: The path is not valid. Check the directory for the database.**[ Path = …\WebSample\App_Data\YourDatabase.sdf ] This error might be a surprise …

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The XmlWordSplitter is a new word splitter class in the latest release of LIFTI. I created it mainly because it was required for the persisted index sample, but it seemed too useful to keep out of the core framework. At a very high level the XmlWordSplitter just enumerates words contained within elements in a piece of …

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This post relates to the breaking changes between version 0.4 and 0.5 of LIFTI. LIFTI is a full-text indexing library for .NET - find out more on its CodePlex site. The latest release of LIFTI has several breaking changes that will affect you, so I wanted to take some time to explain not only what they are, but why I …

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I’ve encountered the unhelpful “The agent process was stopped while the test was running” MSTest error result a couple of times recently, and I thought that I’d share a few of my findings and approaches to debugging the unit tests that cause them. The MSTest “Error” Result In my …

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I use Windows Live Writer to put together all my blog posts, but I also use multiple computers. I’ll sometimes find myself writing a draft post on one computer and wanting to carry on editing it on another. Live Writer stores draft posts in Documents\My Weblog Posts\Drafts, and in the past I’ve just …

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This post will break down how the data in a LIFTI persisted full text index is structured on disk. It might be a bit dry for some, so I’ve tried to spice it up as much as possible with pretty pictures! Birds-eye view The file is broken up into two areas, headers and page data. Each data page is is 8Kb in length …

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The title pretty much sums up my feelings on the subject, but it probably needs a bit of context. I’ve been doing some work for a client that relies on a 3rd party application framework (No, I’m not going to name and shame the framework!). The application is split across multiple servers and we’ve …

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Over a month ago I started to write a persisted file store for LIFTI. Given that I’d pretty much just finished implementing binary serialization for indexes, why would I want to do that? Serialization vs. persistence I wrote the serialization classes because I knew that it wasn’t always going to be …

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