There's a hot new drop of Eclipse to warm you up during the northern winter. Here are some of the more noteworthy things available in milestone build M5 (February 8, 2008) which is now available for
. See the
for details about bugs fixed and other changes.
Platform
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| Regions on controls | You can now set a Region into a Control, which allows for the creation of non-rectangular controls. This example snippet created the snapshot shown below. 
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| Tristate buttons | API was added to allow for tristate check buttons similar to the check buttons in a table or tree. This example snippet created the snapshot shown below. 
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| Print control to GC | API was added to allow the printing of any Control to a GC. For more info, check out Snippet 292. 
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| Browser now uses XULRunner 1.9 interfaces | The Browser widget has been updated to work with the upcoming XULRunner 1.9 release (which is compatible with older XULRunner versions). This affects all Browser instances on Linux, as well as Windows and OSX Browser instances created with style SWT.MOZILLA. 
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| Drag and drop improvements on Mac | When inserting an item into a tree, an indicator is now displayed to show where the item will end up. 
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| SWT for Windows 64-bit Itanium Edition | Windows IA64 has joined the lineup of supported configurations for which SWT is routinely built. To use it you must be running on Windows 64-bit Itanium Edition with a 64-bit JRE. |
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| Direct interaction with text hovers | Are you tired of pressing F2 to see the full contents of a hover and to scroll down? If yes, then enable the new Allow to move into hovers preference on the Text Editors preference page: 
Once enabled, you can just move your mouse into hovers that support this functionality and start scrolling.
The Javadoc hovers in the Java editor now support links to other elements and have a toolbar at the bottom for navigating, moving to the Javadoc view and opening the corresponding declaration:
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| Retain case of match when replacing | There's a new regular expression that allows the case of each match to be retained when using Find/Replace: 
For example, replacing "test" with "\CFoo" in "Test test= TEST" results in "Foo foo= FOO".
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| All Markers view | The All Markers view has been added for users who prefer to have their problems, bookmarks and tasks in the same view (i.e., as it was back in the days before Eclipse 3.0).
It can be found by selecting Window > Show View > Other > All Markers
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| Help feature | The new feature, org.eclipse.help-feature, contains all of the plug-ins required by an RCP application in order to launch the help system. |
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| Intro customizations | New customizations have been added to allow a product to define the start page, home page, and standby page when using universal intro. |
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| Infocenter as web archive | The help infocenter can now be packaged as a web archive (WAR file) which can be deployed on a wide variety of servers. |
JDT
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| Breadcrumb navigation in the Java editor | As an experimental feature, the Java Editor now offers a breadcrumb navigation bar which can be enabled via the Toggle Breadcrumb tool bar button or by pressing Alt+Shift+B: 
These breadcrumbs show the path to the element at the current cursor position.
Each element in the path can be selected and actions can be invoked on the element through the context menu or keyboard short cuts:
Furthermore the breadcrumbs let you navigate to other elements via drop-downs for sibling elements: 
It's possible to navigate to another element in the editor; but it's also possible to navigate to any other element in the workspace and open the element in a new editor. Note: We're still experimenting with the breadcrumb feature. Expect substantial changes before the 3.4 release. Feedback is most welcome.
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| Improved cursor jumping on Quick Fix/Quick Assist | Invoking Quick Fix on a line with problem annotations moves the cursor to the closest problem, which isn't always quite what you want. For example, if you want to rename the field fString in the following scenario: 
invoking Quick Fix (Ctrl+1) will move the cursor to the warning, which is the wrong cursor position to do a rename: 
You can now invoke Quick Fix again to jump back to the original position and choose to rename: 
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| Annotation formatting improvements | Starting with 3.4M5, the Java source code formatter provides fine-grained options for line breaks after annotations. Instead of specifying whether line breaks should be inserted after all types of annotations, it's now possible to specify this separately for each of the different types of annotations: - Annotations on members:
- Annotations on parameters:
- Annotations on local variables:
The corresponding formatter settings are:
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| Improved diagnosis of unnecessary thrown exceptions | The 'Unnecessary declaration of thrown exception' compiler diagnosis has been extended to optionally report warnings for unchecked exceptions (e.g. subclasses of java.lang.RuntimeException and java.lang.Error), if no such exception has been explicitly thrown in the code. By default, the compiler ignores unnecessary unchecked exceptions, but this diagnosis can be activated on the Java > Compiler > Errors/Warnings preference page by unchecking the corresponding box:
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PDE
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| Context Help editor | There is a new Context Help editor available to assist clients creating context-specific help for their applications.
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| Browse launch configuration logs | The Error Log view can now be used to quickly browse launch configuration logs.
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| Flexible plug-in project conversion | In order to encourage clients to not use embedded JARs, it's now easier to convert an existing JAR to a plug-in project. To do this, simply select the JAR within your project that you want to convert and run PDE Tools > Convert Jars to Plug-in Projects.
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| Bundle-ActivationPolicy support | To further align with OSGi R4.1, PDE now supports the Bundle-ActivationPolicy manifest header, the replacement for the now-deprecated Eclipse-LazyStart header.
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The above features are just the ones that are new since the previous milestone build. Summaries for earlier 3.4 milestone builds:
