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Netbeans 6.5 Final Release
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Loading ...A short while back I wrote a quick review on the beta of Netbeans 6.5 and that it had some issues. Since the final version was released some time ago I thought it was time for a new review. This time of the final version.
The reason for me not to write one straight away was simple, I first wanna play around a little to find all the pleasant features and those less pleasant ones.
Bigger, better, best
The first thing you expect is this new version to be bigger, better and the best one yet. Well it is bigger in size, with 190MiB for just Java development. So this means a lot more time downloading, but hey that’s a one time thing.
So lets move onto something more relevant. Is it better then Netbeans 6.1. Lets summorize some of the issues I had with the previous version and see if the problem is solved:
- It crashed when working on larger projects. This issue has been fixed, netbeans won’t crash or hang. Though on occasion the parser may crash. Disabling autocomplete and syntax checking.
- For some reason previous versions had difficulty displaying the names of parameters when using Java libraries. For as far as I’ve been able to determine this has been solved.
- The autocomplete completely fails in some more complicated web projects. Well I’m sorry to say this is still true. For some projects not only does autocomplete fail, but so does the syntax checker, both for the JSP files as well as the Java Source files.
So are there any other changes that would make you consider moving from Netbeans 5.5 to 6.5?
New stuff you will like in Netbeans 6.5
Well have there been any changes that would make you wanna switch to the new version.
- The new version actually has some basic debugging integrated of JavaScript. Though I haven’t got it working yet.
- PHP development is now support. Which is a big plus, but it still kinda feels like a cheap addon that doesn’t work perfectly yet. (Maybe in the next release)
- Thread debugging has been improved and made easier
Unfortunattely not all is good in the world of Netbeans. There are also some new bugs, some of which are really annoying.
- For some unexplainable reason adding of libraries by right clicking the ‘Libraries’ in the project view doesn’t work all the time.
- Like I stated earlier the code completion fails in some of the older Java project I’m working on. Not only does code completion fail, but the syntax checker tells me every single line is wrong. Even though the project compiles beautifully
As a final note: is it worth upgrading to this version. Then I’d have to say hell yeah, it’s a lot better then previous versions. If you are a PHP developer however I suggest not using it, for the moment. Especially when you are already using Zend-Studio, which is still a lot better.
Working On WordPress Mobile plugin
A while back I got some questions if it was possible to create a more mobile friendly version of this blog. Appearantly I have several visitors that are browsing using mobile devices. And I must say my design is not user friendly for them.
Off course they are right, any user should be able to access this blog. Be it from a mobile phone or a computer. So I had to find a way to offer my mobile visitors a better experience. First thing to do that is looking into the wordpress.org plugin library. There are a lot of plugins available for a lot of different things. There had to be some for switching the display to mobile when a mobile device is detected.
And there are. I first tried WordPress Mobile Edition which is pretty good. Big issues I had with it are that it’s not as light weight as I want it to be. And the coding is crappy! But beyond that it does what it’s supposed to.
But me being a developer I decided to write my own little plugin to offer a mobile version of this blog. Fully customizable using templates and settings in the admin menu. I haven’t yet completed the entire design, nor is the admin part working . But it’s currently running on this blog 
. If you want to check it out just add ‘?mobile=true’ to any page or visit using your phone.
When I’m done developing the plugin I’ll share with you all how you can write a simple WordPress plugin. I will also publish the plugin for anyone to download, for free!!!
So stay tuned for an update…….
Creating a dynamic PropertyGrid in .Net
A long time ago I wrote an article on how to use the .Net property grid, but I never published the PDF version of this article. The article describes how to use the PropertyGrid in Visual Basic.net, from basic static property grid to a more dynamic version.
This article is meant for developers who are looking into creating a more flexible property grid then is offered by .Net v1 and v2. It explains how to create classes to add tabs to the property grid and dynamically add and remove properties during execution.
You can download the .Net PropertyGrid article by clicking this text.
Synchronizer 2.0 Beta 1
A long time ago I released an early alpha version of Synchronizer. A tool that can automatically synchronize files between directories. Today it’s finally time for the first beta release. Which fixes a lot of problems people had when using the tool.
One of the first problems reported back to me was that the tool crashed whenever ran with some strange error message. Well appearantly this was caused by the .Net framework, a problem which I solved.
For a quick list of bug fixes:
- Program no longer requires .Net framework to run, which was a big bug in the early alpha release
- Logging is a lot more robust and stable, this actually caused some crashes in the past
- Memory usage is way down, solved a lot of memory leaks
- Solved a problem that for some systems directories were not created at the destination folder
- Solved a problem causing synching to mounted network folders to fail
Of course some things have not yet been solved, but are in the works:
- Multithreaded causes some logging problems and crashes (please be carefull with multithreading at this time)
- If debug information is enabled the memory usage is huge on large directories, on the Windows directory it rose to 89 MB.
If you find any trouble running it or it crashes on you then let me know, and if at all possible send me the log file created by the tool using the -dd option. That will help me track down the problem.
You can download it by clicking this text.
Multithreading is more then just creating threads
I’ve spent some time recently to update the Jong-Soft libraries to support multithreading a bit better. I’ve had this request from a developer that used the library. He loved to use more then one thread and still be able to use some of the key features like ErrorHandling.
To bo honest I can’t blame him. I just hadn’t kept it in mind when I wrote my error handling classes. So the problem was simple. If a new function call was added in multithreading I could not guarantee that the logging would be in the right order. Let me explain by an example:
Thread one calls a function: – error handler creates a function node 1
Thread one creates a thread: – nothing happend in the error handler
Thread one calls a function: - error handler creates a function node 2
Thread two calls a function: – error handler creates a function node 3
Thread one leaves function: – error handler closes function node 3
Hey that ain’t right. Why is function node 3 closed . See the problem, well that is what I am trying to solve right now. Of course there are more problems with multi threading, but this is the one causing the most headaches right know. Especially since I know need to keep track of every started thread to add nodes to the right parent node.
There are probable some more problems I will need to fix in the time to come related to the multi threading setups. I’ll keep you up to date with some of the advances I’ve made with the multi threading solutions.
