Question

I have reinstalled my computer with Windows 7, and Eclipse 3.5.1 (Galileo).

The weird thing is that I can not see any files that Eclipse produces.
I can not find the workspace, can not find the files from the SVN after check out.

It seems like Windows 7 can not read the files produced by Eclipse … wierd

What could be the reason for this?

Answer 1

Where do you have Eclipse installed? Where is your workspace?

In Windows 7 (Vista, actually), a lot of security policies that existed only on paper in earlier versions of Windows, are now actually enforced by the operating system. For example, according to Microsoft’s documentation, it has been pretty much illegal to write to C:\Program Files for decades now, but if you actually tried it, it still worked. Not anymore. As of Vista, C:\Program Files is off-limits.

However, in order not to break existing (broken) applications, Microsoft introduced filesystem virtualization. If an application tries to write to C:\Program Files, it gets silently redirected to C:\Users\%Username%\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files. So, this specific application sees all the files it created or changed in C:\Program Files, but other applications, and this includes the Explorer, see only the unchanged / empty directory.

This does not just apply to C:\Program Files but also to other system directories as well. Also, it applies to system parts of the registry, like HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE for example.

In order to sidestep all of this, I simply installed my copy of Eclipse in %LocalAppData%\eclipse (that’s C:\Users\%Username%\AppData\Local\eclipse) and created my workspace in %AppData%\eclipse (that’s C:\Users\%Username%\AppData\Roaming\eclipse). That Just Works™.