I enjoy programming. It's part of my job, but it's also something I do just for fun. I like seeing code take shape under my fingers and I like evolving it do interesting things. As part of that, I've tended to take a certain recalcitrant joy in having a direct, simple relationship with my source code, without any uppity tools getting in the way. I admire tools like Visual Basic, but I've tended to tend to think of them as tools for other people.

As part of my job, I consciously make an effort to try out various tools, to understand their strengths and weaknesses. So I've done small projects in Visual Studio (many versions), and JBuilder, and Eclipse, and many other tools. And of course I test run various Sun tools, including various versions of NetBeans. In fact I moved a lot of my personal development to NetBeans 3.6 out of a vague sense of wanting to help provide good feedback. However NetBeans 3.6 was definitely rocky going and if I wasn't intent on understanding it, I would probably have given up. So I initially approached Netbeans 4.0 with some caution.

Well, somewhere in trying out NetBeans 4.0, I found that my brain had betrayed me. I discovered that I wasn't just using NetBeans because I "ought" to - I was using it because it was fun. I found I was creating new projects in NetBeans just because I wanted to knock something to together in a hurry and I knew I could both do it more quickly in NetBeans and have more fun doing it.

Yikes! The tools guys have finally corrupted me!

After getting over the shock, I've now finalized moving all my personal development, including various personal projects at home, over to NetBeans 4.0. It is making me more productive, without undermining my sense of direct interaction with the source code.

The largest irritant for me in previous NetBeans releases had been the project structure, which revolved around rather occult notions of mounting filesystems. That has all been replaced in Netbeans 4.0 with a whole new project infrastructure based on "ant" projects. I find that is working really well. Previously I had been using gnumake, so I am relatively new to ant, but fortunately NetBeans normally takes care of the ant details for me, and I've only occasionally needed to reach into the ant scripts.

Of course I also like that NetBeans 4.0 supports JDK 5.0. I've found that I have become addicted to both generics and the extended for-loop syntax. Having the IDE understand and support those is great. I'm also using NetBeans 4.0 for JSP development, where the integration with the built-in Tomcat engine works really well.

Anyway, if you haven't yet tried out NetBeans 4.0, I'd urge you to give it a whirl. I think you'll find it's a radical improvement over earlier NetBeans releases and well worth serious use!