Just two weeks ago I had the honur of meeting Jaroslav Tulach, one of the founders of NetBeans in person. We were giving the NetBeans Certified Training to the students of the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. Jarda showed some cool new features of the platform, especially how annotations can help getting rid of XML files.
It was really a great course, especially since we now have a new Trainer, Thomas Würthinger who is also doing some cool stuff with the Visual Library… (Hi Thomas! Thanks a lot for organizing the course. By the way, I managed some Linzer Torte at the station 
)
Here’s a link to the course website….and next week we’ll be in Ulm!
Great news for the platform! One complaint I heard very often is about the WindowSystem not being configureable enough. Actually I complained myself recently :-). 6.5 introduced configureable behaviour, which was a great first step - but still you couldn’t configure the behaviour of Individual TopComponents, e.g. you couldn’t say this single window isn’t closeable. In NB 7.0 M2 you can:
http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=155926
Kudos to Stan Aubrecht!
Update: Here’s a picture of the new TC Wizard (Thanks Geertjan!):
New TopComponent Wizard
In 6.5 the Window System has been improved to make some of the behaviour configurable. So now you can choose if the Windows are closeable, floatable, etc. great, but it only works for the WindowSystem as a whole. Well NetBeans Developers, give us an inch… :-):
I would like to be able to configure this separately for every single TopComponent as you can do for other WindowSystems. Here’s a RFE to make TopComponents more configurable:
http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=155926
I want this in 7.0!
I’m writing an article for the german JavaMagazin on NetBeans 6.5. A stripped-down version is available here:
http://it-republik.de/jaxenter/artikel/Was-bringt-NetBeans-6.5-2084.html
To replace the default icon of an action, you need to find out where your icon of interest comes from, create a folder named like the modules jar file with the same folder structure as in the original module, and place an icon that’s named exactly like the one you want to replace (a more detailed description is here).
That’s easy, but most platform icons are in GIF format and you might want to use icons that are in a different format, e.g. the popular Nuvola Icon Set that comes in PNG format. I didn’t want to convert a whole bunch of files manually, and I was to lazy to write a script, so I tried ot what happens when I simply rename those PNGs to .gif. And it worked. Quite useful when you have to replace a large set of icons…
