Did VisualStudio just hose my Eclipse IDE?

On Sunday night, I installed the VisualStudio “Community” IDE for C++ on my desktop. It was around midnight. I opened and shut the app just to make sure it was working. Monday, went to day job.

Tuesday evening, I opened Eclipse Luna and was updating it with projects from my laptop Eclipse Luna, via a thumb drive. I had spent about 5 minutes and had opened a new project and was importing the source files, editing package names, and Eclipse closes without explanation.

I reboot. Windows decides at that point to do a major update I had scheduled for 11:59 tonight. Forty five minutes later, I’m told I now have some sort of “Developer” edition of Windows 10. The toolbar and desktop icons for Eclipse Luna are no where to be found.

OK, the workspace file is still there. The app itself is still in its folder and runs.

Damn! That shook me up. WTF.

It is plausible that something I did in Eclipse caused it to crash and wipe out its own desktop and toolbar icons in the process, I suppose. Anyone else have anything like this happen? Or am I just paranoid?

By the way, C++ is a big, over-complicated mess. I don’t like it. I’m committed to following through, though on the current project, implementing some of my sound tools and 3D SF/X ideas for use in Unreal. It would be a huge credibility boost and vindication to see this through, and maybe even result in a decent-paying game-programming job.

Would much rather be back putting most of my energy into Java development.

“Developer” edition of Windows 10

What version of Windows did you have before?

AFAIK it was just a regular version of Windows 10.

I am still getting a bit of twitchiness with this new Windows update. For example, even with all applications closed, when doing a normal shutdown last night an error message about an inaccessible memory location flashed by (went by too quick to read).

But I am now concluding that I was struck by a wave of paranoia. I tried searching for similar problems and nothing comes up. I’m sane enough to assume that my system would not be singled out, and that the Eclipse crash was a local glitch.

It just surprises me that a crash would result in shortcuts being wiped. OS’s are complicated. Who knows, maybe some sort of “helpful cleanup” algorithm kicked in.

Maybe W10 could not find a registry reference for the linked app and decided to eliminate it?

I’m assuming your eclipse IDE is not registered there (not sure if there’s an Eclipse distro that does, I just unzip it where I want)

I get a similarly suspicious behaviour on android, where the app “Adblock Browser” is automatically removed whenever I restart the device, but the desktop link remains (icon-less). I’d rather assume incompetence and guess it’s a faulty reference or something… But you never know.

@Oskuro
I think you are right. Eclipse just runs from a jar file. I do remember a message about being unable to find the application but it is vague if the message also said anything about the registry – which was part of my initial panic that the entire IDE was wiped out. I stupidly went straight to Add/Remove programs and was disturbed that the Eclipse IDE wasn’t there. But of course it wouldn’t be! It is just a jar file, running on the local jre.

Anyway, things are behaving now.