Flex Builder Hidden Gem!

HELLO WORLD,

Last night I had the pleasure of attending a presentation given by Daniel Daugherty at the MDCFUG. He spoke on the dangers of Copying and Pasting within your code to achieve re-usability. It was a very informative talk but what really stood out for me was something that has little to do with copying and pasting. He showed us a little known feature in Eclipse (and thus present in Flex Builder) - the Local History Panel.

I was blown away when I discovered that Eclipse (out of the virtual box) contains a feature that saves versions of the files you save. You can access those versions and even perform a Diff on them. This is by no means a replacement for SVN or some other version control system but it certainly does help in those times when you don’t have a version control system configured in your environment … sort of a poor man’s version control.

So for those of you who have never heard of this feature, here are a few screen shots that show you how to access the Local History panel and its features.

Compare two files using the File Diff

From the menu choose Window > Other Views

Compare a file with a version in the Local History panel

Replace a file with a version in the Local History panel

Right-clicking on a file in the Local History panel

Select Team > History

A view of the local History panel.

I give props to Daniel for pointing this out at the MDCFUG user group last night.

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