I've been playing around with some of the Alpha/Beta releases of Eclipse. I haven't played around with it for quite a while but some of the advancements look really interesting.
Currently Eclipse has 3.4.M7 is available for download. One of the most interesting features is that the user interface now supports WPF on Vista. The Java toolkit SWT now has a WPF back-end, you can see its resolution independence if you look at it through the Magnifier application on Windows. Also, in general, the user interface looks much more integrated into the native platform.
You can see a list of new and newsworthy items for Eclipse 3.3 here and 3.4 here.
The main reason I was trying out the new version was to give the C/C++ toolkit CDT 5.0 a go. Doug Schaefer has blogged about it here.
I was just playing a little with it to see how it compared to the older version and it seems a bit faster. It has the beginnings of some nice refactorings and templates which should make some common coding tasks a bit simpler.
Hopefully when this all comes out Wascana will have a new version released with a nicely packaged C/C++ development environment for Windows. It could make a compelling alternative to other IDEs, as well as giving you access to other great tools like PyDev (for Python), Mylyn (task and bug management), and I suppose Java as well...
