I’ll be manning a booth for Eclipse at the Ontario Linux Fest tomorrow with Igor. If you happen to be going there, come drop by and say hi! :)

Setting an execution environment in your MANIFEST.MF file isn’t difficult. I mean, PDE provides great tooling for doing this on the ‘Overview’ tab and you can just use the ‘Update the classpath settings’ hyperlink to fix up your other preferences (although I think there’s a bug in a rather odd case, I’ll have to look into it later). Sounds pretty easy, right, just a few mouse clicks?

No, you’re wrong. Because, if Java 6 APIs can somehow sneak in to the Platform, you know there’s something wrong. That issue’s been fixed but 204736 is still an open issue. I hope we can get that resolved quickly. :/

If you’re thinking about trying out the WPF build of Eclipse, you better be prepared to wade yourself through the UI bugs, because there are quite a few.

The above is only one example of the problems that I’ve faced. As you can imagine, the top image is the WPF build and the bottom one is the regular 32-bit Windows build. Bug 184878 is also another strange issue. I’ll be filing bugs to the SWT team as soon as I gather more information.

The hacks I made back in April have been committed to DSDP’s CVS repository. The three CVS modules you’ll need are o.e.ercp.sudoku.core, o.e.ercp.sudoku.solver.backtracking, and o.e.ercp.sudoku.ui. I talked to Mark today and the ECF bridge code is not in as that’s an ECF thing and it should be in our CVS repository.

If you’re interested in when that code’s going to go in, please see bug 184491. I’ll get to hacking once we’ve got that settled.

Ever wanted to just listen to selection events from a single IWorkbenchPart like the ‘Outline’ view? Well, org.eclipse.ui.ISelectionService is just what you need. In your own IWorkbenchPart where a call to getSite() is valid (say like in your createPartControl(Composite) method), you can use getSite().getWorkbenchWindow().getSelectionService() to get an ISelectionService. From there, you can invoke addSelectionListener(String, ISelectionListener).

To listen to selection changes from the ‘Outline’ view, all you’d need to do is pass in org.eclipse.ui.IPageLayout.ID_OUTLINE to the first parameter of the method and you’re gold. No more funky instanceof checks for those ISelections and more conditional checks for what they contain and your implementing method also isn’t called a gazillion times whenever something’s happened in the workbench. Keeps the code clean and “improved” performance thanks to it not being called all the time, you’ve just killed two birds with one stone!

Before I sign off, I’d like to remind you all to not forget about removing your ISelectionListener with removeSelectionListener(String, ISelectionListener)! Invoking the call in your dispose() method should be good. Enjoy! :)

Well, one of my patches for the Emonic project has been committed to CVS. Bernhard said he’ll review my patches over the next week or so and commit them if all looks good to him. So far so good.

It’s going to take a fair bit of work to take this plug-in to a beta level, but I intend to help out wherever I can.

I originally thought that there was only Improve’s and Black-sun’s in existence for the C# language. However, it seems that I’ve been proven wrong, there’s actually also Emonic. The most recent commit was less than two days ago and it just had a release on May 14th, so this project is definitely alive and kicking. Oddly enough, it’s using the CPL instead of the EPL, but whatever! It’s alive and well and that’s what matters (and it doesn’t *cough* use the GPLv2 or the LGPL). I’ve submitted two little patches to their bug tracker (one for using OSGi manifests instead of the deprecated plugin.xml way and another for a tweak in its horrid wizard user interface) and am now patiently awaiting a response. I’ll report back when I’ve gotten a reply.

There might still be some download/mirror/synchronization issues at the moment, but with any luck, you should be able to download Eclipse 3.3, with the simultaneous release being “codenamed” as ‘Europa’. You can find out what are the new and noteworthy features in this release right here.

Happy hacking all!

The code that I wrote back in April was IP approved yesterday by the Eclipse legal team. The eRCP team is going to take it from here now, although I’ll naturally be trying hard to keep tabs on the thing. I don’t know when they will get to it, but it will definitely be “happy times” when they do.

Ever wanted to add something to that ‘Run As’ context menu? Yeah, I had to today, and it wasn’t pretty. Let me tell you, that org.eclipse.core.expressions.propertyTesters ain’t no fun. It makes no sense and it just didn’t work out for me.

So instead I just ended up contributing my own content types with the org.eclipse.core.runtime.contentTypes extension point and then hooking that into the contextualLaunch element of the org.eclipse.debug.ui.launchShortcuts extension point. Just take a look at the plugin.xml files of the org.eclipse.ant.core and org.eclipse.ant.ui plug-ins and I guarantee that you’ll be good to go.

I’d paste some of that XML stuff, but it seems that WordPress for some reasons doesn’t want to render tags properly regardless of whether I put them in a code, a tt, or a pre block.