Learning Eclipse

General Comments on Learning Eclipse if you are a Visual Studio Developer

At first, Eclipse seemed a little clunky too me. So many options, menu items and windows and I couldn't seem to do as much. But this is all just learning curve, you just cant feel comfortable in a new IDE until you put in some time. But of course I am in a hurry to write a great app!! The more I start using it, the more I realize how rich and functional the Eclipse IDE is. One example: in VS, I search all the project text at once and wade through the results. I am used to that. In Eclipse, it gives me all these choices like am I searching just text or java code or am I searching tasks? If I am searching java, am I looking to match a type or a field or a constructor or something else? When I do the search should I only look at declarations or should I also look at references? Wow, normally a blind search is good but these options would be great for the times I have to search for a common word in a specific context (for example, lets say i have a property named Name, that search will yield many results). The search results come in a tree which initially I thought was a pain to open each element, but a simple button lets me expand all of the nodes at once and another button lets me flatten the results like I have in Visual Studio.

Opening an existing project or code

If the project is not part of your workspace, you can't just copy the code, use Projects - Import and then choose General - Existing Projects into Workspace

Creating a new project

New | Other | Android | Android Project

1. Project name will be the name of the folder
2. Choose the version you want to target
3. I think its better not to specify an activity name so that you can place them in a certain package.
4. I dont think application name matters but probably should be readable.

Building

1. Note: If you have Project|Build Automatically set to ON, you will not see options to build or build all
2. Project - Build
3. Project - Build All (CTRL+B)
4. Project - Clean
5. Project - Build Path - Configure Buildpath
   1. If you get an error saying that there is a problem with the build path, look at this option. I have seen that adding/deleting a library and then saving and rebuilding can make this irritating error go away.

Searching

1. Search (Ctrl+H)
   1. Note you can switch from the tree view of the results to a plain list (like VS). But the tree view is nice if you use 'expand all'

Compilation Errors

1. Window | Show View | Problems (ALT,SHIFT+Q, X)

Trace Errors

1. Its NOT in console
2. LogCat - look in Window | Show View | Other - Android - LogCat

Hot keys

1. Autocomplete - CTRL+Spacebar