Apache Lucene.Net 4.8 beta is out

Lucene is an awesome java library that provides ultra-fast search capabilities.

Unfortunately the .NET port Lucene.Net hasn't had any releases in over 4 years. This is partly due to there not being many volunteers and the 350,000 lines of executable code to port over to C#, no small feat.

Over a year ago I went to a .NET meetup in London presented by Itamar Syn-Hershko and was pretty excited to hear a new version of Lucene.Net was close to beta.

A few months later I eventually got around to taking it for a spin but quite quickly discovered many of my favourite features still missing. Remembering Itamar's plea for people to help the project, I downloaded the java Lucene source code and as an exercise, started porting the Lucene.Spatial code line by line into C#.

This was a huge learning experience for me as i'd not done anything like this before and have't had much experience with Java. After a lot of sweat and stackoverflow searching for java to C# equivalent code samples, I eventually raised a pull request and was pleasantly surprised that it was merged in.

The whole journey has made me realise just how much open source projects rely on community help to succeed. I'm pleased to hear the almost fully featured official beta is now released to the wild.

I'd like to thank everyone who's worked hard in making this happen and allowing me to contribute to the effort.

I'm now off to go play with Lucene.Net 4.8.