[java4first]

I think you should work with what you are familiar with ... I personally think Eclipse is way better than Netbeans, and see no reason not to do it (Netbeans is not easier to get started with, and it uses way more resources than some of our old & tired laptops have). The FRC plugins aren't magic, and the YouTube video on the web is pretty straight forward on how to get going with Eclipse this year (we are currently running Eclipse on Windows, Linux and Macs for development).

From what you have, it sounds like you didn't define the remoteaddress property on the run Ant target with the IP address of the robot (we had the same problem until we watched the YouTube video). Although you can mess around with the properties files, you can also specify it on the command line arguments for your custom build command. If you can ping the robot successfully, then the deploy should work.