I'm having an absolute bear of a time getting Eclipse to play nicely with Subversion, Eclipse, and an Ant build file. One of the wonderful things about working with Dreamweaver is the great FTP integration. I can upload, download, all that wonderful stuff, with a single keyboard shortcut directly in the IDE. I'm not having any such luck with Eclipse.

I think the problem is that I'm not only needing FTP access, I also need Subversion/Subclipse integration. It's my understanding that I can "import" from an FTP site and I forever have a connection through the Team plugins. Unfortunately, I need to "import" from a Subversion repository in order to keep things up to date that way. This makes it damn impossible to use any sort of built in FTP integration inside Eclipse.

To try and get around this I've been playing with Ant (thanks Jared) and build.xml files. The hope is that I can create an Autobuild file that will upload a file any time it's created or changed (I'm not ambitious enough yet to tackle file deletions, bear with me here). Unfortunately, the only thing I've (that means Jared) been able to find is the "depends" attribute of the <target> tag. Unfortunately, this also doesn't seem to work worth a damn... It always uploads the entire project any time a single file changes. The depends attribute isn't checking to see whether anything is newer or not.

The most frustrating part of all of this is trying to find good documentation on complex processes. I've spent several hours on google digging through blog posts, forums, Ant documentation and trying to download jar files, write build scripts, and rebuild workspaces, and nothing seems to work as you'd expect. It seems you need to have a greybeard Java developer looking over your shoulder in order to use Ant, or make it do anything you really want it to.

Can someone prove me wrong, and help me figure out how I can make Eclipse just upload a file when I save it? Is that so much to ask? Please???

Yes, I signed them as well :)

I'm sure they'll be worth some moolah one of these days when I RULE THE WORLD!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA

As part of my new job, I got myself a MacBook pro and have been running Bootcamp on it over the last few days. All in all the experience is good, but there are issues with Windows running on the MacBook that bother me (bad sound drivers, and the fact that the clock resets on each startup). However, before I installed BootCamp I spent quite a bit of time on the Mac and got over some of my "floating windows" phobias. To that end, I'm considering going all the way and switching to OSX. So to get to my point, is there anyone out there that's recently been through this that can give me some pointers on what I might miss?

My biggest concern is not finding a worthy replacement for Beyond Compare. I absolutely love the program, and haven't been able to find anything comparable on the Mac. I've seen other diff tools, but nothing with the feature set that Beyond Compare has (saved sessions, full folder tree synchronizations, folder tree comparison reports, exlucsions, rule sets, etc. etc.). Any suggestions in this area would be fantastic, because honestly, the lack of a good Mac file diff tool would keep me on the PC for good...

Angela has outted me... I do indeed now work at lynda.com. My official position is Web Application Architect. So what do I do?

In no particular order (and certainly not exhaustive):

• Maintain existing ASP-driven site
• Fix issues (we don't have any y'know, our site is PERFECT!)
• Develop new applications for the site
• Infiltrate the company with ColdFusion (they will all be assimilated)

I've been working at the LDC (sounds fancier that way) for about 2 months, and I'm enjoying being constantly engaged with new things to work on.

So I'm sorry if my posts have been few and far between. Not only do I have a new job, but I'm getting ready to move cross-country again. I'm heading back to the homeland, Texas... We're due to move in July, and I can't wait :). Here's a sneak peek...

That's right, I have confirmed through sources yet to be named (ACE people) that MAX will be this October 22nd to the 26th in sunny Las Vegas. They planned it on my birfday on purpose y'know...

I leave for MIX06 tomorrow in Vegas, so it looks like I'm gonna be a Vegas junky this year...