Maybe this is because many of the developers I know are working on the very large GlassFish project, and the larger the project, the more time consuming the processes can be. Well, the good news is that in the current NetBeans development builds, this task has been moved to the background and you now see its status displayed on the toolbar.

The better news is that with the 4.1 release, the scanning process can also be moved to the background by setting the following system property:

-J-Dnetbeans.javacore.background_scanning=true.

You can set this on the command line or in the <NetBeans installation directory>/etc/netbeans.conf file.

The scan is building a metadata repository (MDR) of information about your Java sources. The MDR is used to support features like refactoring, code completion, Navigator and Go-To Source/Class/Declaration. These features will not be available to you until the background thread has completed the scan. However, having used this feature for the past several months now, I have not felt its impact.

To learn more NetBeans tips, check out the first session on NetBeans Software Day - "NetBeans 4.1: learn all the tricks from the development team". And if you're one of the first 300 attendees, you also get a copy of the NetBeans IDE Field Guide, a $50 value in of itself. Oh yeah, did I mention NetBeans day was FREE, as in zero, zippo, zilch. JavaOne registration is NOT required. Save yourself some time at the door by registering ahead of time. Still looking for more reasons to attend? How about hearing what Hideya Kawahara and project Looking Glass have been up to (I hear he may even be bringing the dukulele)? Or, what Javalobby's Rick Ross has to say? So, come by and pay us a visit, you won't regret it.