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Snow Leopard Eclipse Settings Gotcha

I just upgraded my MBP to Snow Leopard and I found that Eclipse would no longer start on my machine. It turns out that I had some custom settings in my eclipse.ini file, that I had picked up from a blog post by Marc Esher. Those settings did help speed up Eclipse, but one of them also prevented it from starting after the 10.6 upgrade.

I removed the offending option, -XX:+UseParallelOldGC, from my eclipse.ini file and now Eclipse is up and running again!

Managing Multiple Eclipse Installations

I've been using Eclipse for my CF development for several months now, and I found an article awhile back that explains how to set up Eclipse so it's easy to run multiple versions, as well as keep all of your plugins in one place. This method has been working very well for me, so I wanted to post a link to the article in question:

Managing Multiple Eclipse Installations - by R.J. Lorimer

I encountered one issue with this method when I upgraded to Eclipse 3.4, so I thought I'd post the solution here.

The problem is that you need to have access to the menu item Help -> Software Updates -> Manage Configuration... to tell Eclipse where to find your plugins. I'm sure you could specify this in some XML file somewhere, without going through the UI, but I don't know where that is. Anyway, that menu item is absent from the standard Eclipse 3.4 menu, but it can be resurrected.

Just go to Preferences -> General -> Capabilities, and check "Classic Update". Voila - Help -> Software Updates -> Manage Configuration... is back!

You Can Open a Word Document in Eclipse

This may be something that most people already know, but it took me by surprise. I was looking at the contents of one of my project's directories in the Navigator window, and inadvertently double-clicked on a Word document. Guess what happened? That's right, the document opened in Word, inside an Eclipse editor window.

Pretty cool, actually. Now I don't even have to leave my favourite environment to edit Word docs. Not surprisingly it works with Excel and Powerpoint files as well. Must be an OLE thing.