This one had me stumped for a little while today. I was using a WebRequest in a Silverlight 4 application to post some data to an API endpoint, and whenever I called EndGetResponse, a NotSupportedException was thrown. To help illustrate the problem, here’s a mock-up of the code: 1 2using System; 3using System.Net; …

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Important note - this code is not to be considered production quality - as always feel free to use it, but please take it with a handful of salt. In my experience working with these sorts of APIs can be a real killer if you’re not extremely careful about how you write your code. When you’re making calls to the live.com …

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You can find the source code relating to this posthere.** Since Visual Studio 2005 we have been able to write debugger visualizers to help us look at data in a more convenient way whilst debugging. A while ago I needed to write a visualizer for LIFTI - the problem that I had was that the type I wanted to visualize was …

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In this post I’ll be showing you how to use Visual Studio 2010 performance analysis tools to find slow parts in your code, make changes and then verify that those fixes have actually been beneficial. I will be analyzing the LIFTI code as of change set 54973, so if you want to you can download it and follow along, …

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In my last blog post I described how I implemented the lock manager in LIFTI. This was pretty straightforward because ReaderWriterLockSlim was leveraged to do all of the really heavy lifting, but the hard part came when I wanted to unit test the code. This post will take you through the thought and implementation …

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I’ve wanted to get a bit of thread-safety going in LIFTI for a little while now because one of the my target scenarios was for the index to be hosted in a website. The index is already thread safe for concurrent reads, but it would definitely be a really bad thing if we started mixing concurrent writes with our reads, …

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Happy new year! If anyone has been following the recent check-ins that have been happening over on the LIFTI CodePlex site will have noticed quite a bit of activity over the Christmas period. In this article, I’ll try to summarise what those changes have been and why they were introduced in the way that they were. In …

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As always, you can find the LIFTI project at its CodePlex home: http://lifti.codeplex.com. Until now, the way in which you can query against LIFTI has been pretty basic. If you searched for “apple orange”, you would only get items back that had words starting with both apple and orange in their associated text. For …

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Working with other people is hard. Working with new SDK documentation is even harder, especially when it’s wrong. If you’re following the Working with OAuth WRAP Windows Live SDK documentation and you get to the Acquiring an Access Token sample you’ll probably encounter a 401 unauthorized error when you try and read …

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Back in the original post where I first introduced LIFTI I wrote: LIFTI will not…: Handle word derivatives, e.g. if “Cats” is searched for, objects containing just the word “Cat” would not be returned. This was always something that I wanted to handle, but felt that it was better to have a simple system that actually …

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