Of late I've been working on a couple of Eclipse RCP based applications. The biggest problem I've run into is the lack of good example applications for the RCP. Either they are too big (the Eclipse IDE for example) or too small (the sample RCP application supplied with 3.1). Then I came across JLibrary.

JLibrary is large without being too large. It has example of most of the things you'd like to do with the RCP without the weight of the Eclipse IDE. If you're interested in using the RCP then I'd suggest checking it out.

When I don't have my developer hat on I do some work helping development team improve their process. Recently I've been working with a very successful group of young developers who have a great learning management suite. Unfortunatly it is suffering from a growing bug count and the guys are spending the majority their time reacting to bugs rather than adding features.

The system is written on the .NET platform using visual studio. The project was the first for many of the developers (being straight out of university) and they took a look at the Microsoft tools available and said "hey this makes thing easy" and it did. For a while.

There are plenty of "organic growth" issues in the code base, but what struct me the most was the amount of infrastructure code for persistence, security etc, they'd had to develop. The sort of stuff I'd forgot about a long time ago. I realised that the reason I can be productive when creating a system is that for the majority of time I can just concentrate on the unique aspects of the system, not on the infracstruction.

Yesterday I needed a container to manage a small number of components and although I've used Avalon in the past it's fairly heavy and intrusive and the thought of adding all the dependencies to my web app just made me a little hesitent. After looking at a few containers I decided to go with PicoContainer. An hour later it was integrated and combining my components. You can't ask for much simplier than that. Now I've read all the arguments about the use of constructors being evil blah blah blah, but this thing just works and its nice and light (44K with debug symbols).