Netbeans 4.1 Release Candidate 1

Engines, Libraries and Tools Tools Discussion
#1

http://www.netbeans.org/community/news/index.html#621

WOW! Each version of Netbeans gets much better, I mean more than twice as good as the previous version.

Not only is code completion instant but the IDE looks a lot better too.
It loads faster, looks better, includes better navigation support.

#2

Yeah, I’m really liking this version. I started a new project with NB yesterday. It’s the first time I’ve done anything Java outside of Eclipse in a long while.

#3

Which means it’s still pretty awful, sadly.

Tried latest version today, and:

  1. in help, java “project basics” includes pretty much everything except “using 3rd party libraries”. Idiots
  2. double-click to selcet a file you are loading doesn’t work in most dialogs
  3. there are two menus “add library”. Only one of them adds a library to your projecct and it ONLY exists as a right-click context menu. The other merely “adds it to the list of libraries you can add using the other menu”
  4. delete doesn’t delete things from projects
  5. if you select “tutorial” it overrides both the OS and browser settings and clobbers a random browser window to display it’s own URL.
  6. in order to do one of the most important basic things - access a file from within your own project (not documented, by the way!) - you have to select the file from the “files” section of the IDE, copy it (ctrl-c), go to the source foldres section, select a root source folder, and then paste it! Nothing else works, there’s no menu options to achieve this, etc.

But, hey, it looks pretty. And it can render PNG’s in your source directories. And the menus are much easier to understand than eclipse (but that’s because they cheat, and lots of critically important menus don’t exist). But the benefits are still outweighed by general rubbishness and amateurishness :(. I’m bitter because I thought that maybe it was now much better than eclipse (which I’m fed up of being broken in lots of little ways in many places which never get fixed).

#4

the new profiler looks very nice

#5

Followup: the profiler often doesn’t work. For no reason at all. It randomly breaks itself and won’t start. When it does work, it’s nice. Not incredible, but certainly a must-have feature that would get you away from eclipse :slight_smile:

Literally if you wait 5 minutes and try again, it will work.

(when I say “breaks itself” it gets itself in a situation where it’s bytecode instrumentation fails with a cryptic error message telling you to look up error 62 in the docs you don’t have)

#6

Hey blahblahblahh , it seems you’ve already made your own opinion. Your feedback would be very valuable if reported directly to nebeans folks. I wonder how many bugs you’ve reported so far :-\

#7

I also think the profiler (M7) is very nice. I’m not using it extensively (too early to optimize my project), just to get an overview, so I didn’t experience Blah’s mentioned bug yet.
However, if it’s with NB 4.1_final, please report it. In case a full bug report is too time costly, you could mention it with a few lines on the NB user’s mailing list.

It’s readable via Web (postable? Don’t know) and fully accessible via e-mail or NNTP. Please see: http://www.netbeans.org/community/lists/

More the details on the mailing list “nbusers@netbeans.org” is at: http://www.netbeans.org/community/lists/top.html