Unfortunately there has not been any development around the Eclipse plug-in and Roo since those early milestone releases so it's highly likely that Spring Surf is now incompatible with the latest versions STS and Roo. The direction of using Roo and the Eclipse plug-ins for developing Spring Surf applications has been abandoned so your only option is to work directly with configuration files. The tutorials in their current state (where they focus on Roo development) should be ignored.
Spring Surf is still under active development (see Kev's response in this thread: http://forums.alfresco.com/en/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=40434). We're aware that we need more documentation on Spring Surf development and are looking to improve it, but unfortunately I cannot say when new tutorials will be available.
If you have any specific questions regarding Surf development with regards to Alfresco then please post them on this forum and I will attempt to answer them.
