More than 6 months ago I blogged about Lucene.net starting his path toward extinction. Soon after that, due to the "stubbornness" of the main committer, a few forks appeared, the biggest of which was Lucere.net by Troy Howard.

At the end of the year, despite the promises of the main committer of complying to the request of the Apache board by himself, nothing happened and Lucene.net went really close to be being shut down. But luckily, the same Troy Howard that forked Lucene.net a few months before, decided, together with a bunch of other volunteers, to resubmit the documents required by the Apache Board for starting a new project into the Apache Incubator; by the beginning of February the new proposal was voted for by the Board and the project re-entered the incubator.

Since that day a lot happened to Lucene.net:

• a new website was redesigned
• the development restarted, and they are catching up with the backlog of bugs
• the first official release 2.9.2 has been made in March
• they are working to stabilize the 2.9.4
• they are starting to .NETify adding Generics to 2.9.4
• Jeff Atwood sponsored the project by starting a logo design contest and a new logo has been chosen
• there is also a Nuget package for it: http://nuget.org/List/Packages/Lucene

What is going to happen next?

At the moment, together with catching up with the long backlog, they are working on a SL/WP7 version of Lucene.net, evaluating a new and better automatic porting system from Java and already looking at starting with Lucene 3.

Shall I start using Lucene.net with confidence?

The answer is definitely yes.
I would have not said so at the of 2010 but now, thanks to Troy and the new set of committers, Lucene.net is definitely back on track, and I see a bright future for it.
Even if not contributing with code, I'm happy to have partially contributed to the rebirth of the project having raised the issue back in November, and in the future I’ll also post project-related announcements on my blog.