Recent Posts by Geertjan Wielenga

The last session is over and, in total, John and I have now retrained 47 Java instructors from all over the world. In the first session, in Munich, we retrained 4 instructors, 14 in a virtual session from Munich, 9 in the live session near London yesterday, and 20 today in the on-line session. The 20 instructors that we dealt with today logged in from Germany, Sweden, Italy, Russia, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Scotland, England, and South Africa. Not bad. It was actually...

Today was the third one-day course I gave for the 'Train the Instructors' courses. Java instructors are being trained to use NetBeans IDE to teach Java (instead of command line and text files or alternative IDEs). Today, the session (near London), was attended by 8 instructors. Most of them knew each other, except for Andrea Martano, who had come all the way from Italy to attend the course. He, out of all of them, was the only one who already had experience teaching Java via...

Well, that was quite something. My first live session teaching through Elluminate. The whole thing finished 10 minutes ago, so everything is still fresh on my mind as I'm typing this. It all started quite badly—John Cosby, my fellow presenter, had microphone problems and, though being able to hear everything, couldn't say anything because his microphone failed to work. Time for the course to start came round,and there were about 15 people logged in! (Compare that to the...

Well, my first day of teaching the 'Train the Instructors' course for Java developers who are switching to NetBeans in their Java training material is now over. And, I guess, all in all, it was pretty good. I was really nervous about it, this morning, but now that the first one is over, I think the remainder will just be repetitions of today (with variations obviously). The class consisted of 4 students (i.e., instructors unfamiliar with NetBeans who will start teaching their...

In Are you in/near Munich or London? (Part 1), I announced (to the world at large) that I was going to be in Munich and London this week. I invited anyone near these places to drop me a line if they wanted to meet up. So, after exchanging a few messages (first in my blog and then later via e-mail), a meeting was set up at Munich airport—Georg and Peter were waiting for me when I had passed through customs (where I paused for a second to consider whether having 30 NetBeans...

While I'm blogging, I'm also in an on-line NetBeans training course done by Gregg Sporar in a web-started application called Elluminate. Since I'll be using the same technology in Munich and London next week, I'm attending as an observer (and, let me tell you, Gregg sounds just as persuasive on-line as he does in real life). I hope I'll live up to his high standards next week... In the meantime I could spend several paragraphs describing how cool Elluminate is and how...

In Command Line CVS or NetBeans Internal CVS?, I showed you how my traditional command-line CVS tasks can all be done in NetBeans IDE. But, now I'm getting a bit further and discovering the additional things the IDE can do for me in this area. My favorite so far is this one—CVS annotations. First, choose "Show Annotations" on a file: Then, the IDE shows you the versioning history of the file (i.e., the version and the committer). Plus, when you hover on an annotation, the IDE...

Is it just me? Or did you also get an image similar to the one below seared on your brain the first time you heard the term "cartoon riots"? Anyway, best to think about other things. Such as, for example, the great new NetBeans IDE 5.0 HTML Editor Tutorial. It is not 100% complete, but almost. Here, in an application and tutorial by Jaroslav Tulach, one of the founder members of the NetBeans team, you get to see how easy it is to create an application—without any coding—on...

There are update centers all over the world—I know of at least the following (off the top of my head): Masoud's (Gmail Checker), Sandip's (variety of cool editor tools, such as 'Copy Up'), my own (various API samples as well as Iván's class-based argument module), Nicolas (JavaScript Editor), and there's also someone (in Austria, I think) with a work-in-progress JNLP MultiView Editor in their update center. However, it's a little bit of a painful process to register those...