I've been playing around with Apache Solr recently on my Windows box as part of a project I'm working on, and yesterday got around to the fun of trying to deploy it out on Ubuntu. There's an apt package for Solr, but unfortunately its not been updated in some time and the maintainers appear unable to work on it - so if you're using apt you're stuck with Solr 1.4. You can however install it straight onto the box. Here I'll be installing Solr 3.6 on Ubuntu 12.04.

If you're a developer who has ever dealt with Windows Error Reporting you'll have used the AppMap tool and the WinQual site at some point to create product definitions that allow you to retrieve information about product crashes in the wild. What you might only just have found out is that these have recently been replaced - WinQual is now part of Dev Center, and AppMap has now become the Microsoft Ecosystem Metadata Exchange (I'm sure they didn't just name it so they could give it the acronym MEME :-)).

In the previous post we demonstrated how to create an extensions package for Visual Studio and managed to view details of our package in the about dialog. In this walkthrough we'll actually get to the meat and bones of custom project types - referencing MPF for Projects and actually creating a custom project type.

Do you maintain a lot of programmatical artefacts that relate closely to what you or your team does? Maybe you have a XML files that store input for systems you’ve built, or some kind of EDI data that needs to be maintained in good order. If you’ve got lots of data of such kind and it could benefit from a user friendly editor or source control a custom project type might be the answer.

Someone at work recently created some nice templates to use in Microsoft Virtual Machine Manager to help us set up VMs, but instead of using the normal product keys they used multiple activation keys. These keys can be helpful when you only have a set number of machines to deploy - but they can only be used a set number of times and are then deactivated. In a testing environment where machines are frequently built and then thrown away this can mean your templates suddenly stop activating.