I've reinstalled Eclipse like 5 times in the last 6 months. It's not an Eclipse issue, it's just that I keep trying different operating systems and different machines (fun but makes life a little crazy).

Anyway, for some reason I can never remember how to turn on line numbering in Eclipse.

To turn on line numbering in Eclipse:

• Windows | Preferences
• General | Editors | Text Editors
• click the “Show Line Numbers”

Eclipse and JEE with Bill Heitzeg

Even though I was the leader last night, I learned quite a few things. First apparently when you're logged into google it returns "your" top searches, not necessarily "The" top searches. Thanks to Jay Harris for that.

I tried last night to mix lecture and the practical. We worked through the foundations of JEE (the Servlet and the jsp page) using Eclipse. It was very hard to do in an hour, but from the feedback I got, everyone seemed like they learned something they didn't already know. As Jay Harris said "Sometime's clicking on New Project for the first time is the hardest part of coding". He was full of sage wisdom last night.

Next week Chris Marinos is leading on F#. Tonight Chris is speaking on F# at Ann Arbor Dot Net Developers. Don't miss it.

First Friday in November at Tech Town

I was down at Detroit's Tech Town on Friday. We, meaning Stout Systems, have our own office at Tech Town. Each First Friday of any given month, Tech Town holds a mentoring session in the afternoon and a First Friday event which includes guest speakers and lots of food.

We hold our monthly meeting in the morning and then John Stout and I go to the mentoring session. What a great way to stay connected and to give something back. As mentors we're asked to help local startups and let me tell you, there are some amazing ideas coming out of Tech Town and it's entrepreneur community. It was really fun to meet some of the new entrepreneurs and to get with some that I've known for almost a year and see how they've gained business and grown their organizations.

Thanks to all the folks who make Tech town possible.

It took me an hour to write this line of code

String valueAsHTML = getContext().renderTemplate("/newsletter/newsletterPreview.htm", model);

It's a very cool line of code, but a whole hour? In software development, at least half of development is what you know. Since I didn't know how to use Apache Click to render HTML into a string, I had to spend some time looking for it. Now I can send my Apache Click page through email!

It is a cool line of code, thanks to: Malcom Egar-2 at Nabble.