EclipseCon 2008 summary

Just spent most of last week at EclipseCon 2008 for the first time. It was a great trip where I met a host of people and really had a chance and time to investigate some technologies I was interested in. Basically I had some ideas on how other Eclipse project technologies like BIRT and Mylyn could be merged into future releases of Carbide to help our users in their day-to-day development. I left with a few ideas churning in my noggin, and while they still need some investigation they do look promising.

One bit of technology I really became enamored with was Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA), an XML based method of organizing and mapping documentation so that it can easily be output in different ways to create exactly the right manual for the job. Will see how if goes converting a small Carbide manual into DITA format to see what happens very soon now.

A big thanx to Dr. Lee Anne Kowalski for explaining it all, both in her presentation and during lunch breaks at the User Assistance table. Her presentation on 10 common UA problems solved a couple of issues that I had observed in my Carbide docs and had yet to track down. Now I don't have too, yeah!

Finally got to meet some of the CDT team including Doug Schaefer, Chris Recoskie, and others, just to put a face to the names. Good to meet you all, hope to see you next year.

Plug-in Spy happiness (again)

Thought I'd try a small experiment with Plug-in Spy. While it works great from within the 3.4M5 release I use everyday to manage and test my doc plugins, would it also work with our standalone product? Even if its based on the 3.3 sources.

Copied the org.eclipse.pde.runtime plug-in to the Carbide\plugins folder and relaunched.



Pressed ALT+SHIFT+F1 and BAM! Works like a champ.