I guess I should have realised that starting a new blog on the 13th (even though it was not a Friday), might be a bad idea. 
Soon after the first post I experienced technical difficulties with the server. Today I finally got around to setting everything up again, so here is the first real post.
One of my favourite features of the NetBeans IDE is source formatting. With the press of a few buttons (Alt + Shift + F) (or Source | Format from the menu bar), you can convert a real mess…
package javaapplication1;public class JavaApplication1 {/*** @param args the command line arguments*/public static void main(String[] args) {System.out.println("Hallo World!");}}
into something a lot more readable…
package javaapplication1;
public class JavaApplication1 {
/**
* @param args the command line arguments
*/
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println("Hallo World!");
}
}
The format is highly configurable, to suit the preferences of all developers. The settings can be accessed from Tools | Options, in the Editor category on the formatting tab.
Source formatting is not limited to Java source code though – it works equally well for XML. For example, from
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><root><tag1><tag2><tag3></tag3></tag2></tag1></root>
to
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<root>
<tag1>
<tag2>
<tag3></tag3>
</tag2>
</tag1>
</root>