Using Eclipse
Gone are the days of manually setting up an IDE project. Since we use Maven for our build environment, we can use the [Maven Eclipse Plugin|http://maven.apache.org/reference/plugins/eclipse/index.htmlto generate the eclispe project files (basically the (.classpath and .project files).
When using eclipse together with Maven, you have to initialize your eclipse workspace (only once) so that eclipse knows where you're local Maven repository is. Since I tend to have different workspaces for different sets of projects, I would initialize my GLAST eclipse workspace (which is located at C:\Documents and Settings\langston\workspace\org.glast) as follows:
maven -Dmaven.eclipse.workspace='C:\Documents and Settings\langston\workspace\org.glast' eclipse:add-maven-repo
Here is the directory structure I use if you are looking for ideas on how to get going with eclipse:
IDE Project Files don't belong in CVS
Since Maven can automatically generate IDE project files for all of our IDE's (eclipse, JBuilder, Netbeans, etc.), you probably shouldn't store IDE project files in CVS. Instead, when you check out a project for the first time just run maven eclipse (or whatever the plg-in name is for your IDE).