The Eclipse 3.0 Milestone M3 was released today after being built together as Mars made its closest pass by the Earth in 60,000 years.

Here are some of the noteworthy things available in milestone build M3 from now.

• Two New Quick Assists – Split and join variable declaration and Create field from parameter
• Quick Assist cue – a green light bulb besides the codeline shows you theres a quick assist possible
• Visibility control for generated constructors
• Fast way to create a constructor – choose the fields to be initialized from extra constructor parameters and let it be generated for you :-)
• "Search in enclosing projects" – sort of a fuzzy file search, also as
• Java search in enclosing projects
• Text editor key bindings – new freely configurable navigation hotkeys
• Improved cursoring through Java names
• Improved syntax highlighting – The Java editor is now able to highlight method names:
• Smart Home
• Configurable Go To Next/Previous Annotation
• Block commenting
• Eclipse Java compiler is JCK1.4a compliant
• Open up JDT - There have been several improvements aimed at opening up Java development tools: Refactorings Participants, Text Editors: Reconcile Steps, Text Editors: Translators
• new SWT widgets: HTML browser widget, Tables with colored cells
• Automatic updates – juhu – one step further to keeping up to date
• Mirroring of update sites – for creating a local mirror of features on a remote update site
• Uninstalling features – disabled features can now be uninstalled to free up space on disk
• Improved key customization dialog – usability enhancement
• Unit testing for plug-ins
• New PDE build configuration editor
• Debug launching in the background
• Improved watch expressions
• Breakpoint properties – the breakpoint properties dialog appears as a standard Properties dialog with pages
• Breakpoints in external source – put a breakpoint in external source code (i.e., source code that is not on the build classpath of a Java project)
• Disabling breakpoints – Breakpoints view now has checkboxes for quickly disabling and re-enabling breakpoints

  

• Ant 1.5.4 – Eclipse now ships with the latest version of Ant – 1.5.4.
• Disable external tools builders – External tools builders can be disabled and re-enabled via buttons on the External Tools Builders property page
• Helpful Ant warnings – get warned if you attempt to execute Ant without a tools.jar on the Ant classpath

Download it here