• Searching with SOLR - Part 2

    28 March, 2013 filed under solr, lucene, search
    In the last post I introduced Solr, explained why it was helpful over straight Lucene, and showed how to get it up and running with some example data. Part 1 (Background, installation) Part 2 (Custom schema, data import) In this post, I’d like to show how we can quickly get Solr loaded...view more

  • Entity Framework - Dealing with large 'WHERE IN' statements

    16 March, 2013 filed under entityframework, c#, sql, batches
    I just wanted to quickly blog about a technique that I found really useful recently. I was in a situation where I was passing a large (30,000+) number of ids from a web app (let’s call it System A) to a console app (System B) using Message Queuing. When System B received the message, it ne...view more

  • Searching with SOLR - Part 1

    3 March, 2013 filed under solr, lucene, search
    In this series of blog posts, I’m going to walk through the process of getting up and running with using Apache Solr in ASP.NET MVC. This post, the first in the series, will offer background information and show how to get Solr installed. Part 1 (Background, installation) Part 2 (Custom ...view more

  • Combining NuGet with Team Foundation Build

    16 April, 2011 filed under .net, deploying, nuget, tfs, continuous integration, source control
    Update: This post refers to NuGet 1.2. Although the techniques described here are still valid, once NuGet 1.4 comes out, Dan Turner’s fork will no longer be necessary. Thus, please keep the date of this post in mind! I’ve been experimenting with setting up a build server for our dev team at ...view more

  • Configuring Your Dell BIOS Remotely

    9 April, 2011 filed under bios, remote, windows
    This past weekend I wanted to experiment with setting up Team Foundation Build on a VM, and I figured I’d do it at my leisure from the comfort of my home. After connecting via RDP to my office computer, I realized that I had forgotten to turn on Hardware-Assisted Virtualization (HAV) before le...view more

  • Deploying Oracle Applications without Installing Oracle

    3 April, 2011 filed under .net, deploying, oracle
    Depending on your environment, getting an app running on a production server can sometimes be a daunting task. Generally, the less you have to configure, the better. So when you need to deploy an application that uses Oracle.DataAccess and the right version of Oracle isn’t installed, good luck!...view more

  • Taming ADO.NET Typed Datasets

    28 March, 2011 filed under .net, datasets
    At my current employer, I get thrown a lot of small “write-it-and-forget-it” apps that often involve querying a bunch of databases and producing some result. Since we’re a fairly large institution, this might involve querying a variety of database servers — not all SQL Server. For these ...view more