Ted’s Rants and Raves by Ted M. Young

I don’t know about you, but I’ve got code in my code base that still uses arrays and we need to move them to Lists. Sounds like fun, huh? Well, a new refactoring in IDEA 8.0, Type Migration, is going to help a lot in this task. The other feature that blew me away during the EAP was the Data Flow To This… command, which lets you see how the variable you’re looking at got its value all the way back through the method chains. This is really useful when you’re trying to figure out, say, why the value is null and where it got set that way.

Examples and screenshots on these coming soon. 

Yeah, IDEA 8.0 has been out almost a week, but I’ve been so busy with the Code Camp preparations, I didn’t have time to focus on it.

I’ve been using 8.0 since the first Early Access builds, and it’s been a very solid product all the way through. There were some regressions in the way things were "painted" (causing background colors to not work properly in some cases) that I’m betting has to do with the fact that IDEA 8.0 ships with the 1.6u10 release of the Sun Java VM. Those bugs are fixed and I’m happily using 8.0 on its 30-day trial until I get my 7.0 license upgraded. I’m bummed that I didn’t win the JetBrains raffle at the Code Camp, but oh well.

I’ll be posting thoughts and information about the new 8.0 features over the next few weeks. 

If you attended my "Easing Into Agile" or "Building Better Tests in Java" sessions at the Silicon Valley Code Camp 2008, I’d love to hear any feedback, compliments, constructive criticism, and any questions that you might have thought of. The code camp eval for the Agile session is here: http://tr.im/yqi and the eval for the Builders session is here: http://tr.im/yqm. I also encourage you to leave a comment here if that’s more convenient.