Coming up for air

I’ve been pretty quiet lately for a couple of reasons. I’ve been spending a great deal of time over the last two weeks preparing for Eclipse Forum Europe (EFE) this week. I arrived in Germany a little earlier today; with my presentations pretty much good-to-go and all domestic responsibilities deferred for a week, I finally have a little time to return to the surface.

I’m delivering two talks at EFE, both on Wednesday. The first, “Test First Development Using Eclipse” is a completely new talk that discusses (oddly enough) test first development using JUnit in Eclipse. I start off with some pretty simple Java examples (similar to what I do in a screencam I recorded last year), move quickly into plug-in testing, and then dive into some J2EE testing. All with a test first methodology (that is, tests are written before the code being tested).

The second talk is titled “Anatomy an Eclipse RCP Application“. This talk is an evolution of a webinar—with the same title—that I delivered a few months ago. For the webinar, I had intended to do live code walkthroughs, but was halted by technology limitations. I’m going with the original plan this time through. I’m trying something new with this talk: I’m defining tasks in Mylar that contain relevant code artifacts for each aspect of the walkthrough. Essentially, for each concept I want to talk about, I only have to activate the relevant task and only the bits of code that implement that concept will be visible in the package explorer. Mylar is so very cool.

I’m hoping to try something else that’s a little new (at least for me). I’m going to record my talks as screen cam demos. If it works out, I’ll post the demos on Eclipse Live.

I’m also hosting a Eclipse Code Camp on Wednesday evening, and will be representing (at least informally) Eclipse at the W-JAX Ballroom.

I’ll be wandering around the conference and exhibit floor on Tuesday and Wednesday. Please feel free to stop me to discuss any aspects of Eclipse that interest you. Also, if you’d like to participate in a podcast with me, please let me know (either by comments to this blog entry or via email: wayne{at}eclipse{dot}org).

correction: Thanks Wassim for noticing that I had previously specified my e-mail address incorrectly. Yikes!