> 1) Is it possible to set-up a development environment in an IDE (ideally
> Netbeans) so that the IDE understands the code, the dependencies, and
> whatever else it needs. I want to be able to click to the buttons "compile"
> and "run" just like a Java project, for example. (I imagine that the
> "compile" button would have to call "rosmake" and the "run" button would
> have to call "rosrun".)
>

As far as I know no one here has experience with netbeans.


>
> 3) What is the "starting point" of RVIZ? I found that visualizer_app.cpp
> seems to be called pretty early.
>

visualizer_app.cpp is the starting point.  You'll probably want to read up
on wxWidgets (http://www.wxwidgets.org/) and Ogre3D (http://www.ogre3d.org/)


>
>
> Also, created a folder where I pasted RVIZ's source code (from SVN). From
> Terminal, I ran rosdep install rviz, but it gave me a bunch of errors (see
> below). However, rosmake rviz worked perfectly. rosrun rviz rviz as well. I
> suspect that it does not run the code from that folder, but rather the RVIZ
> binaries installed on my computer. To test, I modified the OnInit() method
> in visualizer_app.cpp to add this:
>
>
> int foo = 1 / 0;
> cout << "foo";
> if{
>
>
> Clearly, the compilation and runtime should have failed. But, rosmake and
> rosrun worked again.
>
>
> Could you please shed some light on this?
>

You likely haven't added the path to your version of rviz to your package
path.  http://www.ros.org/wiki/ROS/EnvironmentVariables#ROS_PACKAGE_PATH

Josh