This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by Weiqi Gao. Original Post: NetBeans 6.0: A Week Later, And A Much Better Story Feed Title: Weiqi Gao's Weblog Feed URL: http://www.weiqigao.com/blog/rss.xml Feed Description: Sharing My Experience... Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by Weiqi Gao Latest Posts From Weiqi Gao's Weblog

First, an apology: My initial reaction to NetBeans 6.0 seven days ago was overly harsh. That post was made ten minutes after the download. And now I'm sorry (I'm really sorry, as in "I wish I never did it") I made that post in such a haste.

Now I have some explaining to do. As I mentioned in the comments to the earlier post, I tried two non-Java related features: C++ projects and UML reverse engineering. The C++ project exhibited some weird behavior—Netbeans claimed that my C++ project doesn't have any source files in it, despite my repeated attempts to add C++ source files to it. The UML reverse engineering project did not behave as in the NetBeans tutorial—no model was generated, only an XMI file.

Over the weekend, something wonderful happened. My Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 informed me that I have updates:

And I said, "Cool, now I can get NetBeans updates from the Debian repository." I did not mention this in my Getting Sun Java 6 On Debian 4.0 With APT Pinning post 37 days ago, but I also installed NetBeans 5.5 from the Debian unstable repository. NetBeans is in the contrib portion of the Debian unstable repository, so I have to change my /etc/apt/sources.list file:

# deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r0 _Etch_ - Official amd64 DVD Binary-1 200704
07-12:15]/ etch contrib main

deb cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 r0 _Etch_ - Official amd64 DVD Binary-1 20070407
-12:15]/ etch contrib main

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ etch main non-free
deb-src http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ etch main non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib non-free
deb-src http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib non-free

deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org etch main
deb http://www.dipconsultants.com/debian etch main

### unstable #######
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free

and follow that with

[root@gao]# feta update
[root@gao]# feta install netbeans-ide netbeans-platform

With that bit of work, my reward is the automatic update of the software packages when the new version comes out.

To make a long story short (as I've already made this short story long), I tried the same things on my Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 box, and they worked as expected. I was able to create C++ applications, static libraries and dynamic libraries. I was also able to reverse engineer a Java project to generate an UML model.

That got me thinking. What did I do wrong on my Windows box? The only thing that I could think of was when I started NetBeans 6.0 for the first time, it asked "I see that you have a NetBeans 5.5 profile in .netbeans, would you like me to import that?" and I said yes.

So I went back to my Windows box, deleted the .netbeans directory, and started NetBeans 6.0 again. And this time my two tasks worked correctly even on the Windows box.

One thing that I have to do to make the C++ project work is to add C:\cygwin\bin to my System path, otherwise NetBeans couldn't find the compiler, the debugger, make or the shell.

There you have it. It's been a week, and I like NetBeans 6.0 a lot more.