Twas the night before the CDT summit and all through the house not a creature was stirring, except for my son waiting for the Halo 3 launch. Luckily I pre-ordered and it’ll be arriving by mail so I don’t have to stay out all night. Which is good since the CDT summit starts tomorrow and it looks to be three days of hard work while we plan for the next release of the CDT next summer for Ganymede.

Every summit seems to have a different atmosphere and I have no idea how this one will go. We’ve gone from being desperate for contributions two years ago to a whole pile of features landing at once last year. I think this year will be the search for maturity, at least I hope so. We’re five years into it and we still don’t have firm (or as my good friend Michael Scharf says, “crisp”) APIs. We need to get this right soon or we’ll start missing the window where the current mess is acceptable.

We also need to take a good look at everything to do with Debug. Little has changed here in five years either and we’re still dealing with a paradigm, while fine for Java developers, is foreign to C/C++ developers. We had a good code camp today with the Device Debug folk and the good news is that we’re all feeling the pain and have the desire to do something about it.

We also need to work on other workflows as well that are driving our users mad (and more importantly our customers). The whole IResource system has never worked the way C/C++ users want, especially those who’ve used other IDEs. All they want is to be able to add files to projects from anywhere and to exclude files under project folders. This is getting to be very high in my list of complaints I’ve been getting recently. I have some ideas on this and we’ll see if they can fly.

It should be a good week, and I think were going to walk out of it with a lot of work items. Interestingly, the toughest ones will require changes in the Eclipse Platform and we know how challenging that can be, and not necessarily for technical reasons…