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.

The code was pretty straightforward, really. Some stuff had to be hacked up here and there, but it works.

As you can tell by the windows being drawn, the left picture was taken on Windows XP and the one on the right is on Linux.

While only two devices are being linked here, the code actually allows an infinite number of devices to be interconnected. Naturally, there will be problems with data replication and synchronization here if multiple people try to set a value to a cell (be it the same one or a different one), but whatever.

Building on top of Wayne and Chris’s work, everyone’s favourite mathematics puzzle (or not, because I don’t think any of my readers gives a damn about sudoku) can soon be solved on your own embedded device!

More to come tomorrow as I attempt to synchronize it up with my notebook via UW’s wireless services.

Generally, before you look or ask for help, you will whine and complain about it verbally to anyone that is near you or to yourself. I did a bit of that before proceeding to examine the source code itself directly to try and discover the cause for my problem. I did not from the get go because eRCP does not bundle source plug-ins with their SDK downloads. Thus, I actually had to check this code out from CVS.

And behold, look what I’ve found!

public void setAlpha(int alpha) {
        // do nothing, not supported for win or ppc
}

No wonder my GC doesn’t support transparency, code like this just might do it. It would’ve been nice if there was something in the javadocs, though, since SWT is advertised as being a “cross-platform widget toolkit”.

Next to shampoo-and-conditioner 2-in-1, the JDT classpath container is arguably the best invention of the last 100 years.
-Wassim Melhem, PDE Lead

Fact or fiction? Let’s hope bug 182537 gets resolved soon as someone popped into #eclipse today inquiring about bug 109137 today. Given Wassim’s comment, would it be possible for this to make it into 3.3 before the end of June? If the JDT team wants to beat companies like Pert Plus (my personal shampoo of choice) and Head & Shoulders and show that they are the number one invention of the last century, they better get on it.

I think these statistics speaks for themselves. ;P

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go back on IRC. ;)

Bug 180773 is certainly nothing to get all excited about, but I’ve at long last finally been able to contribute something to the base Eclipse platform. This will be a bug to remember in my many years to come.