The new Vstudio seems to fix this (or at least it did for me) All I had to do was click the different framework and choose to autoreplace for the project... though I can't remember if I made a macro for that ages ago rather than it being standard >.>

Sometimes attempting to fix, or clean up, MS Net versions loop with errors, or are otherwise unsuccessful. Repair installs may also fail, but this tool works.

Posting a link to help if you encounter this. If you are playing with it, you are smart enough to figure out whether you should use or not. Hope it helps someone, as it took me a number of attempts, not wanting to reinstall all of Windows, and hours of po'd indignation before I found it :-)

http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/CommunityServer-Components-PostAttachments/00-08-90-44-93/dotnetfx_5F00_cleanup_5F00_tool.zip

What do the first two lines do? Do they install the latest x32 and x64 JDKs and JREs and uninstall the previous JDK and JRE versions?

This is not something one has to do very often. In fact, I've not yet had to change Frameworks for .NET, I have for Java though... From 5 to 6 to 7...

It rebuilds your Eclipse projects based on your project description (pom.xml file), it'll point to whatever JDK you've defined as a target, all necessary plugins (downloading them if needed), and all the explicitly defined libraries plus their transitive dependencies (again, downloading them if you don't have the proper version cached). The F5 reloads all files from disk, including your Eclipse project files and immediately applies them.

Incidentally, Maven is also the reason I can have a brand new developer actually developing on my project in about 3 minutes (the time to download libs, their src jars, and Javadocs). It's very convenient in a fluid team.

I assume it also fixes deprecated code and points out code that might not work the same as before, or no? Not that this has been much of an issue since Java is really still in 1.X despite the numbering scheme they implemented. I wonder what will happen when a "true" Java 2 will come along.

This is really a very minor issue in .NET. I've had to deal with runtime updates more often with Java than .NET and that can be spun into either a good or bad thing.

This Maven program sounds like MSBuild or Nant....

There's Maven plugins to do that, the Maven Eclipse plugin does not have this function so far as I know, but pretty much all Java IDEs point out the use of deprecated methods by default, that has usually been enough for me. Classloader leaking libraries is much more of a problem, imo. Apache Tomcat put in really outstanding detection about 2 years ago and almost all major libraries that had issues have since been fixed.

POM files are object models for a project, they can inherit from one another and do all the things that you would expect when you hear "object model". I typically create a parent POM and then inherit from them for each sub project (domain, dao, etc.). Usually each POM will produce an artifact during build, but it doesn't have to.

Now, at first glance it's easy to think, "Maven, yeah, another build tool, so what?" And Maven does do builds, but since it's a project description you can do any number of things with it (and the appropriate plugin) such as create a website for your project, complete with Javadocs and unit test coverage. That's the power of a project description over a straight build file (like Ant or Nant). I'm probably not doing it justice, honestly.

I thing MSBuild goes beyond a simple build tool as well, but I don't have more than very limited experience with it, and that was a couple years ago. MSBuild, from what I recall, allows inheritance or properties and allows you to call external programs/plugins, etc.

The .NET doc xmls are built depending on project settings, converting them to a webpage wouldn't be too tough, I don't imagine. I do prefer Java's method of sharing code documentation over .NET's, which has to be included in the help application or some such. I like things being separate.