Please Help A Newcomer ...

Question

First of all, since I'm a newcomer, and there's a chance I'm posting this in the wrong place, bear with me.
I recently downloaded the J2SE SDK and NetBeans 4.1. And, I'm trying to develop a desktop application with it. I'll leave the details of the application aside for a moment, but there's a host of issues I want to address before I even get to the actual business of coding my application.
First of all, design time. And layout managers.
I understand perfectly well the underlying theory - namely, that layout managers provide cross-platform formatting of visual content. In practice, however, it's proving to be one of the biggest sources of annoyance I'm encountering with this development system.
First of all, my top-level application window ALWAYS starts up with ridiculous dimensions. As in too small for any internal content to be rendered satisfactorily. And ALWAYS heads for the top left hand corner of the display. Unless of course I write code to explicitly set the size and position of my top-level window. But surely the whole point of an IDE is to remove such bureaucratic piddling about from the programmer, leaving said programmer to get on with the actual nuts and bolts of the application? And if it doesn't do this, and simply shovels these chores into the programmer's lap, what's the point of the IDE in the first place?
The same thing happens with EVERY top level container. Unless I waste time writing code to explicitly set the size and position, it ends up being positioned at the top left of the display, and rendered at a totally useless size. Which in the case of one of my dialogue boxes, meant that when I first tested it, I couldn't access any of the widgets on it (made all the more amusing by the fact that the dialogue box wasn't resizeable).
Now, there happens to be a 'preferred size' property for all of these components. But, here's the fun part. I can't edit them at design time. To make matters even more hilarious, instead of telling me I can't edit them at design time, the property editor pops up, maintaining a glorious fiction of editing the property, allowing me to specify values, which it then promptly ignores. And continues to render all my top level containers at stupid sizes.
Furthermore, if I want to change the look and feel of the application, again, I have to dive in and write code to do this. Otherwise I get the default every time. Nowhere in the documentation (either in the Help Files or online, both of which are monstrous edifices seemingly designed to provide some bureaucrat with a source of illicit thrills) is any mention made of being able to determine look and feel of my developed application by telling the IDE to do this. Once again, I have to engage in tedious mucking around writing code to do this, when I should have spent the past week actually coding the application. Frustration a plenty. So much for the publicity blurb. I'm almost reaching the point where I'm going to uninstall the whole shooting match and write the application in assembler (yes, assembler!) because I'll actually experience fewer frustrations ... at least then I know from the start that i'll have to engage in tedious mucking around with low-level matters from the word go. Part of the reason I decided to give Java a try (apart from the possibility of improving my recruitment marketablility) was because of the publicity hoopla about how I could get on and actually develop my application (or to use the blurb, 'concentrate on the business logic' ... something tells me this was put together by some MBA rather than a real programmer), which thus far has turned out to be yet another case of shiny trinket expectations dangled before the eyes followed by immense disappointment at the total failure in the follow through.
Now, before I give up on this and go back to my assembler roots, I'm going to give this another try. Anyone out there care to help me address these issues, or am I going to discover once again that so-called "modern development environments" (don't even think of getting me started on Microsnot's efforts unless you want to be killed by the flying shrapnel) are so much wishful thinking combined with lamentable implementation?
Oh, and is there any chance i'll be able to place widgets on a dialogue box where ***I*** want them to be, and arranged how I want them to be arranged, without either [1] the IDE deciding that I am to be completely ignored in this respect while it places the widgets where it thinks it would be a good joke to place them in order to precipitate maximum annoyance, or [2] having to immerse myself in yet more coding bureaucracy for who knows how long before the shiny trinket promise of being able to 'concentrate on the business logic' looked like being remotely fulfilled?
Here's hoping ...

Answer 1

Well, if there had been some indication in the legion of documentation I've perused (which again, seems to have been designed along the lines of 'if you know what to look for, then you already know the answer') as to how to achieve this, I wouldn't have posted here. But, having spent a week looking for some indication as to how to overcome what should, at bottom, be nonexistent problems, and having found nothing that even remotely hints at the answer, I decided to come here.
One, as I've already said, top level containers materialise in an unusuable fashion unless I actually go to the trouble of explicitly writing code to force them to be a workable size. Two, widgets seem to have a life of their own. I've tried experimentally using different layout managers, and each time all that happens is that a different set of annoyances materialise.
The irony is, that when it comes to managing the actual code, the system has features I really enjoy. And catches a whole range of problems before you even get to the stage of issuing the 'Clean and Build' command. That I like a LOT. But GUI designing, which should (after all these years of GUIs being in existence) be a simple matter of 'place it here, hey presto', seems to occupy some Kafkaesque parallel universe.
First of all, I'd like my top level containers to be a workable size. As I've already said, setting the preferred size in the property sheet has no effect whatsoever. The IDE just ignores any attempt to set this. Which is weird, because when I write code to set the preferred size, hey presto, it works. But once again, I maintain that the whole point of an IDE is to handle these chores and let me get on with the underlying machinery. And thus far it isn't doing this.
As for widget placement, I could simply abandon layout managers altogether, and go for absolute placement. But then I'd have to write code to make sure that everything was sensibly placed and sized every time a top level container was resized. Which is what the layout managers are supposed to do. Supposedly freeing me of this chore and, once again, letting me concentrate on the application's nuts and bolts. But, thus far, all my attempts at getting layout managers to handle this chore, which is after all what they were supposedly designed for, results in desk-banging frustration.
Now, if I could be pointed at a web page that explains all of this in plain English, this would be a great help. Because opening 23 different browser windows to keep track of a vast web of API links in the hope that one of them will cause the little light bulb to pop up above the head is again, more than a tad frustrating.