A Specializing Generalist

For my current project, I'm integrating the Silverlight Toolkit's charting functionality with our application. As part of that effort, I came across this excellent post by Jeremiah Morrill on binding multiple chart series, where he provided the code to an attached behavior that supports this scenario. However, I had a few additional requirements that his original didn't handle. Most notably, we needed the ability to set the X and Y axis titles and to set the minimum and maximum values on each axis. Although I'm not going to copy all of the code here, there were a few interesting challenges in implementing...

So, I kind of rushed to get this site set up after my bicycle accident so that I could let people know I was OK, so my original site title was a bit lame. As I've been thinking about what it is my blog is going to be about, I realized that trying to pick a specific topic wasn't going to work very well. My career as a software developer started when I was 16, when I did some (fairly simple) digital signal processing work on a MASSCOMP unix-based system in C. From there, I worked in C, Assembly Language, Microsoft Access (yes, Access), Delphi, VB6, VB.Net, and C# (with a few other lesser known languages...

In case you're interested in understanding where Adam and I crashed... http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&FORM=LMLTCC&cp=qj8wz47yym0s&style=b&lvl=1&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&phx=0&phy=0&phscl=1&scene=34992346&sp=Point.qj8wqf7yykt5_Crash%20Site____&encType=1 Note the raised curb in the middle of the sidewalk - unfortunately, they didn' cut the sidewalk area out, so there's about a 6 inch rise in the middle of the sidewalk because of the now-useless "don't turn left out of this empty field" curb. It appears that there use to be an office...

So, it seems that we have a winner in the "is it or isn't it broken" race... broken. I have a "radial head fracture" in my left arm. Thankfully, it's not bad (more like a hairline fracture than anything more serious) and I'll only be in a splint for about 2 weeks. After that, I have another 5-6 weeks before the bone is completely healed, so I'm going to have to stay off of the martial arts mats for at least a little while. All in all, not so bad given how much damage could have been done in an accident like this. See if you can spot the break in the x-ray (I think I know where...

As I've been working on integrating our internal help-desk product PowerHelp with Community Server, one of the big challenges was to figure out how to get our internal wiki to not only display as an integrated part of Community Server 2008, but also to allow users to search our wiki content from the main Community Server search system.

Internally, Community Server's "Enterprise Search" functionality leverages Lucene.net to handle full-text searches.  Lucene (and it's .Net port) are very well known in the search world and Lucene.net makes a great platform for supporting full-text + meta data searches across almost any kind of content.

After spending some time learning the basics of Lucene and how it works, I dove into Google's full text index to see if there was any easily-accessible examples of how to integrate with Community Server's enterprise search.  No such luck.

The rest of this article will describe what I did to get my data indexed, and some of the techniques I used to discover the specifics of Community Server's Enterprise Search's interaction with Lucene to get my data out of the index and onto the screen.