December 2005 Archive

Eclipse 'Compare with Local History' Saved My Life!

Well, perhaps ‘Saved My Life!’ is a bit extreme, but it certainly turned my day from ending on a total downer to ending on a high.

After spending the last few days working on a feature for the current project we’re working on, I was doing a merge in Perforce on a few files that I had changed due to the new feature.

After doing the merge and then doing a complete build to ensure I hadn’t broken anything, the build failed to my horror because a fair amount of code had vanished during the merge! Evil!

In any case, one of my fellow developers on the project suggested I gave the Eclipse feature ‘Compare with Local History’ a go. And my day turned around, as I could step through all the changes through out the day to the point where the merge happened. I saved my code! Woo hoo! I was not looking forward to having to re-write it all! It even works if you have closed Eclipse and then reopen it! What a FANTASTIC feature!

Eclipse becomes my most favourite IDE the more and more I use it. It rocks!

Posted by Niklas Richardson on 05 Dec 2005