I’ve recently had to switch from Visual Studio to Eclipse CDT.
It would seem that Eclipse ‘workspaces’ are not quite like VS solution files.
Eclipse workspaces use the .metadata folder for managing multiple projects, but there doesn’t seem to be a simple distinction between user settings or IDE preferences and project/solution settings.
What I want is a way to group a collection of related (and dependent) projects together and have that data live in source control without all the other user specific stuff that developers don’t need to share. You know, like a .sln file in Visual Studio.
Does Eclipse just not work this way? (And if not, then why not?)
Yes you are right eclipse does not manage projects in the same way VS does with solution files. However for putting a group of related projects into a VCS eclipse has the concept of a Team Project Set available in File->Export then under the Team folder there is Team Project Set.