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DZone has a number of refcardz – cheat sheets for developers. They are free and can be viewed on the website, but you have to be signed in (registration is also free) to download them. Useful refcardz include: Core Java, Design Patterns and NetBeans IDE. And now there is also a brand new refcard for the NetBeans Platform!

Developers that build NetBeans platform applications will be very familiar with one of the steps in the build process: “Generating Information for Auto Update”. The reason is that it takes quite a while compared to most of the other steps in the process (see this e-mail, for example). Since I have not been able to find an exact answer anywhere (the mentioned e-mail conversation contains only part of the answer), I decided this afternoon to embark on the journey to find where this is triggered.

The short answer is… it is performed by the ‘netbeans’ target in the <NetBeans platform folder>/harness/common.xml ant script. The task is called ‘genlist’. If you comment this out, the “Generating Information for Auto Update” step will not be performed.

For those that are interested in how I found this out, here is the explanation. :) Using V-Grep, one of my favourite freeware tools, I searched through the NetBeans platform source code (version 6.1, the only source version I have downloaded) for the log message “Generating Information for Auto Update”. I finally found it in nbbuild\antsrc\org\netbeans\nbbuild\MakeListOfNBM.java. Armed with the knowledge that the ant target class that is responsible for this process is called MakeListOfNBM, I searched through the ‘harness’ folder in my NetBeans installation. I found out that the ant task is called ‘genlist’, and searching for that I found where it is called.

Edit: I found the same question on Geertjan’s blog too.