With EclipseCon just over three months away (March 21-24), it's time to think about registering. I caught up with the program chair, Chris Aniszczyk, to get an idea of what we can expect at the conference. The Program Committee has made some early selections already, and here are a few examples: 

•  One of the tutorials we selected comes from Jason Van Zyl and involves “Building Eclipse plugins and RCP applications with Tycho, Nexus & Hudson." This tutorial should be great for people looking at hands on work with Tycho which makes building Eclipse and OSGi related artifacts much easier than in the past.
  
• Benjamin Muskalla and Steffen Pingel from Tasktop Technologies will talk about being "Tired of CVS? Pimp your productivity with Git, Gerrit, Hudson and Mylyn." First off, Git is the future of version control at Eclipse. Second, the Mylyn project has recently been working on Hudson related tooling so you can see the status of your builds all within Eclipse and jump to code using stacktraces from Hudson. On top of that, the new top-level Mylyn project at Eclipse is working on Git and Gerrit integration within the existing Mylyn tools.
  
• Finally, Tamar Cohen from NASA will talk about how “NASA Ames uses Eclipse RCP for real-time situational awareness of remote robots." It's always nice to see how people in the real-world use all this Eclipse technology via a case study. Plus, it gives folks a chance to talk with fellow attendees about any cool things they had to workaround or build on top of Eclipse technology.

There are also some EclipseCon Auditions being held tomorrow, December 15, in the Ignite format, where each speakers gets 5 minutes to present 20 slides. The auditions are hosted as an online webinar.

Finally, if you're planning on registering, the Very Early Bird rates are available until the end of this month. Members, committers, Alumni and OSGi member can get a further reduced rate of only $1,095.