It seems that Microsoft has decided to submit their shared source licenses to the OSI. Only time will tell as to what other moves Microsoft will make in the future, but let us all hope that they’ll keep it up.

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.

Can Ian Murdock, father of Debian, help bring Java to the Haiku platform? Only time will tell. But let it be known, though, that yours truly, will be praying hard.

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.

There’s an ’s’, it’s a plural, there are two. Two that’s actually going to conflict with each other. They really planned that out nicely, oh yeah. We’ve got JAX Asia 2007 in Singapore on November 26th and the 27th and in Jakarta on November 29th and the 30th. Then we’ve got OS Summit Asia on November 26th to the 30th in Hong Kong. I am not going to be there, of course. The flight costs would be ridiculous and I’d be missing too many classes just because of flying alone. I’ll rather miss class in the winter term for EclipseCon 2008 instead.

I think I’ve probably spent about a day and a half so far trying to get a build system working for our project. The Eclipse build process has a ridiculous amount of intertwining Ant files and it sure ain’t pretty. I mean, how hard could it be to tell Ant to fetch some files from a repository and then run a build on it? Oh, you’d be surprised, believe me.