Can I test changes to the IDE without going through the license check and so on?

If you set the system property netbeans.full.hack to true, the following IDE behaviors will be disabled to make it quicker or more reliable to test other functionality:

Auto Update background check (to see if updates are available); you can still use AU via Tools > Plugin Manager
prompting about still-running tasks when shutting down
license dialog
import of old user directory
IDE registration dialog
dialog suggesting that you submit usage statistics
welcome screen displayed by default and RSS feed refreshed
blocking dialog when some modules could not be loaded
use of ~/NetBeansProjects/ for newly created projects (java.io.tmpdir will be used instead)
resizing gesture submit dialog (SubmitStatus.resize)
weekly Maven repository indexing (can be configured in Options dialog)
long package name for default group ID in new Maven project (test used instead)

This property is set by default when you:

run the IDE from sources using ant tryme
run the IDE from a netbeans.org module project using Run Project (ant run)
run a functional test using NbModuleSuite or a unit test using NbTestCase

If you need to test one of the suppressed behaviors (e.g. you are working on the license dialog), just do not set this property. For the ant tryme and ant run cases, add

tryme.args=

to nbbuild/user.build.properties or ~/.nbbuild.properties.

Apache NetBeans 24

Can I test changes to the IDE without going through the license check and so on?