PDE Nuggets

I find myself constantly amazed at the hidden gems you can find in Eclipse. Today's nugget is brought to you by the PDE, and is the Plug-In Registry View. I found it very useful while playing with namespace wackiness for my upcoming EclipseCON talk.



Some of you may say "What's so new about that?". Well, what can I say - I'm a little behind the times I guess. Most of my extension development has been done in Eclipse 3.2 or earlier, and this view seems to have appeared in Eclipse 3.3, so I'm sure there are others who don't know of its existence. (Correction: It looks like this view has been around far longer than that; as early as Eclipse 2.0, in fact. It just did not look or behave the same.)

I'm a little disappointed, however. I had this plan to write my own "extension registry spy" plug-in as sample code to accompany my presentation, but this view already does most of what I was going to implement. Oh well, I guess I'll have to think of another application to hack on for sample code purposes.

I guess it's more of a diamond in the rough than a gem as there are still some limitations and little bugs to be ironed out, but it is worth a look. So if you're a plug-in developer - check it out:

Window > Show View > Other > PDE Runtime > Plug-in Registry, or simply press Ctrl+3 (another Eclipse nugget), type "plu", and select it from the list.