[Bluej-discuss] Windows Vista and BlueJ

[Davin McCall]

Hi everyone,

As Windows Vista is becoming more prevalent, we are getting quite a few 
support requests about some problems which are occurring. I want to try 
and give some advance warning on this list to anyone who might be 
upgrading to Vista in the near future.

BlueJ when running on Windows uses the "Windows look-and-feel" provided 
by java, by default. The implementation of the look-and-feel is somewhat 
less robust than one might hope and even on Windows XP machines it 
sometimes causes problems. *As it turns out, the Java 5.0 (and earlier) 
implementation of the Windows look-and-feel fails miserably on Windows 
Vista*. This usually manifests itself as file dialogs failing to open 
(for instance, the "new project", "open project", etc commands in the 
project menu appear to do nothing when they are clicked).

I understand that the 6.0 version of the JDK is Vista-compatible and one 
solution for people who want to use BlueJ on Vista may therefore be to 
upgrade to Java 6.0 (not forgetting that you must run the "select VM" 
utility to make sure that BlueJ uses the new JDK). However, we haven't 
yet had any confirmation that this does in fact solve the problem (if 
anyone can verify, please let us know).

There is another workaround for the issue, and that is to disable the 
use of the Windows look-and-feel in BlueJ. This involves editing the 
"bluej.defs" configuration file and changing the "bluej.lookAndFeel" 
setting to "crossplatform". (Just remove the '#' at the beginning of the 
existing line in the file). BlueJ's appearance is somewhat uglier when 
this is done, however the file dialogs should no longer fail to appear.

For more help on editing the bluej.defs file, see 
http://www.bluej.org/help/archive.html#tip4 or consult the reference manual.

Davin

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