C# search engine for internet freebies

From public domain books to Abandonware/ROMs, all sourced from reputable websites.

Spyglass Backend is a C# application that serves as the backend for the Spyglass search engine. It scrapes search results from a community-maintained list of reputable websites. Visit fmhy.net for more information.

Dotnet concepts learned and applied

• ASP.NET Core: Built a RESTful API backend using ASP.NET Core with a controller-based approach.
• Web Scraping: Implemented a sophisticated web scraper using the AngleSharp library to parse and extract data from HTML documents.
• Dependency Injection: Utilized ASP.NET Core's built-in dependency injection to manage the lifetime of services and promote loosely coupled code.
• Configuration Management: Managed application settings and custom scraping rules using appsettings.json and the IOptions pattern.
• Asynchronous Programming: Leveraged async and await for non-blocking I/O operations, ensuring the application remains responsive during web requests.
• LINQ: Made extensive use of LINQ for querying and manipulating collections in a declarative and readable way.
• IHttpClientFactory: Used IHttpClientFactory to create and manage HttpClient instances, following best practices for making HTTP requests.
• Modern C# Features: Applied modern C# features such as file-scoped namespaces, top-level statements, and primary constructors.
• Regular Expressions: Used compiled regular expressions for efficient pattern matching when analyzing HTML content.
• JSON Serialization/Deserialization: Handled JSON data for both configuration and data export.
• Error Handling: Implemented robust error handling to gracefully manage exceptions and return appropriate HTTP status codes.