Now in 8.5 the Domino Designer client is based on Eclipse, as the Notes client was in 8.x. Eclipse is an award-winning, open source platform for the construction of powerful software development tools and rich desktop applications. This architectural change allows the new designer client to become an open source pluggable environment. By allowing the use of plugins, objects can be built, re-used, and shared.

Some of the differences in the new 8.5 Designer client can be seen when examining the processes associated with Domino Designer. It is useful to know how they relate to one another and what component each controls. Prior to release 8.5 designer clients, when you launched designer.exe, nlnotes.exe would be spawned. This is the process in which pre-8.5 Domino Designer ran.

Now in the 8.5 Designer client, designer.exe loads and spawns nlnotes.exe.

Then the notes2.exe process spawns and designer.exe quits.

Finally, nlnotes.exe spawns ntaskldr.exe after DDE opens.

Some other things you may notice are that launch and exit take longer than in previous versions. This is due to the Eclipse startup and shutdown sequences. This can lead to problems on exit or launch. If you experience a problem with launch or exit, it may be due to one of the following issues. Due to the longer exit time, the user may have initiated launch before all prior processes had been killed, or the user may have initiated the launch sequence multiple times. It is also possible that, on prior exit, the client did not shut down all processes.

With a few exceptions, the launch process will be able to compensate for these errors. However, if you still can't launch or exit the 8.5 designer client, you can try the following, manually. Kill the nlnotes.exe and notes2.exe processes with the task manager, or if the client still will not launch or exit, log off the system to completely kill all process threads.