If you have not started the Force.com IDE, bring up the environment by double-clicking the desktop icon. You may be prompted to select a workspace, as explained above.

Change the perspective to the Force.com perspective.

Navigate to File New Force.com Project, which will bring up a dialog like below.

You will be prompted for a Project Name, which must be unique within the workspace, as well as a user name, password, and security token.

Since the Force.com IDE interacts with the Force.com data through the Force.com API, you may be required to use a security token for the organization, if you are outside of the IP addresses listed for your organization, as described in Chapter 7: Protecting Your Data. You can get a security token by going to Setup Reset My Security Token, which will prompt you to click the Reset Security Token button to generate this token. The value of the token will be sent to the email address for the requesting user.

The next page, shown below, allows you to specify the metadata you want to retrieve. The default choice will bring down all of your Apex and Visualforce components. Typically, these code-intensive components are the most likely area you will work on with the Force.com IDE.

The second choice will bring up a list of different component types, and the actual components of those types, as shown below. You can select a subset of component types or specific components within those types. Since you do not have any Apex or Visualforce components in your organization yet, you should use this option to retrieve the metadata for some types of components.

Remember that the selections you make will only specify which metadata files are downloaded to your workspace. Whenever you run your application, the application will be run from the Force.com servers and utilize all metadata for your organization.

Select the second option on the page to select metadata components, and then click Choose.

In the next page, select applications, and objects - custom, and click OK. When you return to the previous dialog box, the components you selected will be listed in the lower text area.

Click Finish to begin retrieving metadata files. Once the retrieval process is completed, the project you just created will appear in the Package Explorer.

Click the plus sign to the left of the project name, the plus sign to the left of the src (source) directory, then the plus sign to the left of the applications and objects directories, which will make your environment appear like the page shown below.