NB 6.0 RC1, my thoughts sofar

Hi,

It has been a while since I last blogged about NB 6. And for good reason since I used it instead of blogging about it. Which to my defense, means that it was a joy to use NB and our game has progressed considerably.

I had a few problems with the code generation for WS support in mobiles, but these were all fixed within a day. Although today I found another code generation problem in NB 6, but that will probably be fixed soon as well.

A few days ago they released the real RC1 and I installed it as soon as I got my hands on it. Luckily for me, one of the dev builds I was relying on, was already dubbed RC1 and thus I had all the customary folders setup already (/.netbeans/RC1) which was a timesaver, although moving the relevant files and folders from one version to another is a breeze nowadays. The RC1 is really stable and apart from a firewall problem I didn't encounter any serious issues, and to be honest, the firewall problem wasn't a NetBeans issue rather a Java issue. I had to remove all Java.EXE lines in the firewall rules of Symantec and have new rules applied and than open everything up for Java.EXE in Symantec in order to get the Update Centers back to work and more importantly the Collaboration stuff (Why isn't Collaboration not a part of the standard distro?) Because we develop the game while sitting at different locations, Collaboration is a major means of discussing our progress.
The SQE plugins (Findbugs and friends) are back in my installation as well, as they are so cool and great to use.

But back to NB 6 RC1. The major gripe I and others have are erroneous error-badges. I can't care that much about it, but a friend of mine considers this a really bad thing. Might be that he's got less confidence in his coding skills and thinks that when NB thinks something's wrong, it must be although he thinks all is fine :)
The rest is going really smoothly, loading is really fast, unless you have a lot of projects that need to be opened, than it can take for ages. Maybe NB could track the projects I really work on and open them eagerly and the others lazy? The same might apply for plugins. Those I use regularly should be opened right away, those I don't should be loaded lazily. If possible. Still RC1 loads faster than previous builds I feel.

All in all, it's getting there and the level of quality is great, especially since it feels like about all addon packs are updated and better integrated as well. Still some open issues that I would like to see fixed. Maybe those that are more irritating to newbies should be fixed asap in the first few weeks after the release of NB6.

Iwan