Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Out of Lockdown V2.0

As Curtis put it: it is nice to be out of the 3.3 lockdown. It means that we can start writing some cool code and adding in some cool new features. Curtis already told you all about the cool new dragging and dropping. I will tell you about non-resource based context launching.

You might remember back in 3.3M6 when we added in the new feature for context sensitive launching, heck you might even be using the new feature. For all the good that it brought to the world, it did have a severe drawback; it did not work with project artifacts that were not resource based (had or could get a handle on an IResource).

What we want to do now (in the start of 3.4) is extend context launching to allow contributors the ability to tell us how to launch something. That way if we don't know how to launch foo.xxp you can provide a context launching participant to tell us how you would like it launched.

We are hoping that this will bring together the best of all worlds of launching and make it even easier for novice to expert users to make use of launching/development in Eclipse.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Escape from 3.3 Lockdown

It's so nice to be out of the 3.3 lockdown. We can finally put some new features in (plus there was time for a week long vacation in Rushing River). In the two weeks spent working on 3.4, the Debug team has already added many new fixes and features. One of these new features is dragging and dropping for the variables and expressions views.

To create a new watch expression for a variable in the variables view, you simply select a variable and drag it to the expressions view. You can even select multiple variables to create expressions for them all.

To create a new watch expression you can also drag text from the editor or anywhere that supports text dragging. Drag selected text onto the expressions view to create a new watch expression with the dragged text as its code snippet.

When dragging to the expressions view you can insert to a specific place in the view, or just add it to the end. You can also drag existing expressions to reorder them in the view.

During 3.4 the debug team is looking at other ways to use drag and drop to improve the user experience. If you have any ideas, leave a comment or file an enhancement request.