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Experience with Eclipse IDE

Till now all my work experience has been in Microsoft technologies, MFC, COM, C#. Due to this I have always worked in Visual Studio. Visual Studio is the best IDE.

I recently shifted to a group which deals with technical aspects of projects like technical audit, technical trainings, tools automation to name a few. I got a chance to do a technical audit of code written in Java. The developers used Eclipse IDE.

I downloaded and installed Eclipse IDE. I fired up Eclipse and to my horror I saw that there was no command for “Open project”. There was a menu for Open File, Import etc. but no “Open Project”. I confirmed with the project development team and sure they were using Eclipse. I thought that something was amiss with my installation. I spent about 2 hours fiddling around and trying to find out a way to open an already existing project. 

Finally, I decided to do a Google search. I found the blog, http://itscommonsensestupid.blogspot.in/2009/01/open-existing-project-in-eclipse.html

I was surprised and elated. Surprised, because it requires a blog to explain the method to open a project. Elated because I could open the project by reading the blog. Thanks a lot “Soon Hui” The name of the blog were my exact words. It should be common sense to open a project, but heck no, Eclipse does not think so. You can create a new project and save it but to open it, you have to use Import… how very intuitive (stupid).

The blog is written on January 1, 2009. This means that it’s been more than 5 years now and still the option of “Open Project” is not available. This seems to be dumb enough. However, I thought again. Maybe, just maybe it is intuitive for the users who use Java and Eclipse IDE. This was a very different world which I had not experienced before.

Why would Eclipse not have an "Open Project" option. I would love to know the reason for this. Please leave your comments below.

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