What are the dangers in upgrading to Java 1.5 and beyond?
<p>I am a long-term user of Java (but I am a scientist and not a professional developer) . I upgrade whenever new versions come out but often I only use a small portion of the new features at first as I don't always have time to study everything.</p>

<p>Recently I learned that unless I fully understood generics I was likely to have serious dangers in using (or in this case not using them) - dangers which I was unaware of and which are not obvious. (I appreciate that I was warned by Eclipse but I didn't understand the warning!)</p>

<p>The particular case in point was that it is now (since 1.5) bad practice to use raw types and that <code>Class</code> (rather than <code>Class&lt;?&gt;</code> or <code>Class&lt;MyStuff&gt;</code>) had serious dangers. see <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4337313/why-is-class-preferred-to-class">Why is Class preferred to Class</a>.</p>

<p>My question is - what others dangers am I likely to encounter and be unaware of as a result of upgrading to Java 1.5 (or 1.6, 1.7) but using my old code or style of programming?</p>
