I've been told that an Eclipse workspace is the equivalent of a Visual Studio solution. But I've also been told that people commonly use a single workspace for all their work. Are these apparently conflicting statements correct? If yes, how do we then create and maintain the equivalent of multiple VS solutions in Eclipse?

Secondly, in the case of VS, I check in my solution (.sln) files, too, into source control. Correspondingly, should I or should I not check in the Eclipse workspace's .metadata folder?