Wedding Date Set

Gillian and I have been over in Victoria for many of the past weekends doing wedding planning. We went around to a whole lot of of places, and have now decided on the date and place for our wedding: Saturday August 12, 2006 in Victoria, BC.

The ceremony will be held at Saint Aiden's United Church, and the reception will be held at the Delta Ocean Pointe Hotel (located on the Inner Harbour).

With this set, now maybe we'll have some time for Christmas shopping!

2006 Port Moody Calendar

I just received a copy of the 2006 Port Moody calendar, and it looks absolutely stunning! I wish I could say that I had something to do with this mastepiece, but unfortunately I can not.

Awesome job Barb!

ASP.Net (C#) Forms Authentication to a Domain without impersonation

You would think that making an ASP.Net web application that authenticates to an active directory domain should be fairly straight-forward. Unfortunately it is not for users of Microsoft .Net 1.1. (Microsoft.Net 2.0 has the ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider class).

The regular way for ASP.Net applications to query ActiveDirectory is by changing the user that the web application runs under. This seems a little bit bizarre.

So I've made a simple web application that uses several DLL calls to do what Microsoft should have done a long time ago.

The DLL calls that are needed are both found in advapi32.dll:

• LogonUser
• GetTokenInformation

Unfortunately calling these functions from managed .Net functions was far-from-simple. But I ended up getting it to work.

Download my ASP.Net (C#) Forms Authentication to a Domain without impersonation Web Application

dotLucene Search Engine using C# and IFilter

Creating a search engine for a website using OpenSource systems is highly painful, even though it doesn't need to be.

It was my task (prescribed by myself) recently to create a search engine for an internal website for basically no money. Because the application will be built in ASP.Net, the code had to be in C#.

Searching around the net, I found a promising project by the Apache project called "Lucene". Lucene looked very powerful, and most of all, was OpenSource. The only problem with Apache's Lucene is that it's all in Java (which I don't want to use).

So doing a search for "Lucene C#", I came across several projects - both of which are dead:

• Lucene.Net is now commercial software
• NLucene is basically dead.

It took me a lot more searching to find "dotLucene" which is still OpenSource, and is still active.

To cut a long story short, dotLucene did not work for me out-of-the-box, and its programming interfaces appear to have inherited the pain of the Java version. Plus dotLucene could not index Word or PDF files out-of-the-box (it only did HTML).

Things I tried to get dotLucene to work:

• read a promising article by dotLucene's author
• downloaded the dotLucene Demo
• Read the documentation on parsing Word and PDF files
• rammed my head against a thick wall

Through much trial-and-error, I finally got something that appears to "Just Work".

Download my C# source code that uses dotLucene and IFilters to index and search website documents

Note: this source code uses sources taken from all-over-the-place. I do not assert any of my own intellectual rights to any of this.