I delivered a presentation for the Java Metroplex Users Group in Dallas, Texas last week. I think the talk went well; at least a few folks in the audience seemed to indicate that it went well and most people stayed around even after the pizza was gone.
Almost everybody in the audience was a current user of Eclipse. I wasn’t expecting this since the meeting was held in a Sun building (I figured there might be a few folks who use alternative IDEs). I spent most of the session using Eclipse itself (I only used a small portion of my presentation). We went through some basic test-first development using JUnit and Eclipse, and then when into the development of a simple “image viewer” plug-in.
I showed off some nooks and crannies of Eclipse that a lot of them hadn’t discovered yet. This is something that I like about Eclipse: you can get by on the basics of the IDE for a long time and discover gems along the way. I have to admit that I’m a little distressed that more folks don’t know about ctrl-space (code assist) and ctrl-1 (quick fix, quick assist); these are keystrokes that I can no longer live without. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, take a look at this demo.
As I was leaving the presentation room, one of the attendees came up to me and told me, “you speak English well”. This caught me off guard. I sure wasn’t expecting it. I assume that she figured that we Canadians are all French. I wasn’t sure what to say. So, I reponded in the most polite way I could think of: “Merci”.
