Good news, everybody. I’m at EclipseCon in Sunny (if not slightly chilly) Boston, and having survived the flight with only a minor headache I’ve registered, met up with a few old friends (and some new ones) and am about to head down for a brainstorming session on bug 300500.

The other piece of good news – and the reason why my blogging has dropped off a cliff over the last year or so – is that I have finally finished writing a book on Eclipse plug-in development. This covers the basics (creating views and so forth) as well as up-to-date content like the differences introduced in E4 as well as how to build and deploy update sites with Tycho and run tests with SWTBot. It doesn’t aim to be all things to all people – in fact, I’d imagine that many reading this post will already know all there is to know about the content of the book – but it’s aimed at those who are starting out their plug-in journey and want to be able to build Eclipse based plug-ins for now and future use. It’s written in a step-oriented tutorial style (somewhat different to my usual colloquial posts) so I’m curious to see if this helps or hinders adoption.

The book should be out by the end of next month, and I’d like to thank those who have contributed reviews so far (and those who have said they will) – I’ll make sure that the Acknowledgements chapter is up-to-date with any feedback received.

Anyway, having finished the bulk of the book and going into a proof-reading and typo-spotting phase, I hope to have enough time to be able to get back to blogging in a more meaningful way than conference write-ups. And speaking of conference write-ups, expect to see my thoughts not only here but also on InfoQ – and hopefully a few video-recorded interviews with some of the fellow EclipseCon attendees.

In any case, if you spot me at EclipseCon and want to say hi, please do so. My Twitter (or App.Net) avatar looks much like I do, except he’s got less grey hair and no body.