I've just changed the search functionality of this blog to use Lucene.NET and all of the quick, rich searching functionality that that provides. It is testament to whoever first wrote the original blog engine search functionality, that it was as relatively straight forward to do as it was. Below are the steps and an explanation of some of the code changes I made - I'm not going to explain what Lucene is or how it works, there are plenty of resources out there that alreday do this, just use your favourite search engine to find them. More...

It's never been 100% clear to me when using second level cache with NHibernate, when NHibernate accesses the cache and when it needs to go to the database directly. There is a great explanation of how NHibernate uses caching in The NHibernate FAQ, but even after reading this, I still wasn't completely clear on when NHibernate has to hit the database, so I went about testing it out myself. Below are the results of my testing; I was using NHibernate 2.1.2.400, FluentNHibernate 1.0.0.629, SQLServer 2008 and NCache 3.6. I created a single test consisting of each of the code snippets below and I set the NHibernate show_sql configuration parameter to true so that I could see when NHibernate hit the database. I also created an IClassConvention that tells NHibernate to cache all entities as read write (in reality I would probably be more granular than this). More...