Last week I talked to a fellow developer, Frank Appel, about Mockito. We've been using this mocking library for over a year. We both agreed that of all the innovations we've tried in the last year or so, Mockito has boosted our coding productivity the most. With this blog series we want to share our experiences with Mockito. You see that I used the word...
Read MoreA few weeks ago the news in Germany was that the average lifespan of German citizens has reached its highest level ever (Statistisches Bundesamt Deutschland). This was good news but I was also surprised to hear that women still live longer than men. I can imagine a lot of contributing factors but maybe that's a long discussion better done over beers. One thing that I've observed,...
Read MoreI know Eclipse 'Help' is not a very exciting topic, but today I found myself working with a little known secret of Help. Most people know that you can setup context sensitive help (Press F1 and bring up help for the specific workbench part under focus). However, did you now you do the opposite? That is, activate code in your RCP application from a...
Read MoreHere is a question that I got on a post about detached views: "How can I detect that a View has been detached from the main window? I would like to adjust the view's behavior in that case." There is no API to obtain that information directly. However it is possible to do this with a few tricks: detached views have an empty window title (i.e. shell.getText().length() ==...
Read MoreFrom time to time, I'm in the situation when I want to suggest a UI change or even try to come up with a completely new UI. While I love programming, it may be easier in these situations to just "sketch" the idea instead of really getting your feet wet. As many people asked me what I use for UI sketches, I thought I should...
Read MoreHere's a nice addition to Riena's TableRidget: you can now mark a table-row as incorrect. This is done with an RowErrorMessageMarker. When hovering over the marked row, the corresponding error message will be shown in a tooltip. [code lang="java"] IMarker marker = new RowErrorMessageMarker("An error message...
Read More"Can you help me use shared libraries with Eclipse CDT, managed make and cygwin?", I was asked yesterday. Read on for a list of common pitfalls and detailed instructions. The instructions are based on the latest CDT release (Galileo) and cygwin (make 3.81, gcc 3.4.4). They are applicable to CDT's managed make projects (that means CDT generates a makefile to build project). The Pitfalls It turns out that using...
Read MoreI spent part of today trying to debug a Linux specific issue in which wizard pages are not being shown properly. Actually, the content of some wizard pages are not showing up at all (Bug 298805 if you're interested). While thinking through the problem on IRC (yes, you should be on IRC), Susan McCourt had a great idea -- install the SWT Spy and see what...
Read MoreLately I have been working on (and committing) a repository analyzer tool for p2. It is meant to help you validate your repository against known problems and common mistakes (missing version numbers, two IUs with the same ID/Version, etc...
Read MoreAs you know, Eclipse can use "Team Project Set" files (.psf) to magically import code from various repositories. Thanks to Karl (294842), we committers can now set a project set url in our project's metadata. This will link to a .psf-file from our project's About page. Here's how this looks for Eclipse RAP: After saving this file, you can use the "Team Project Set" wizard to download the...
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