This is literally Visual Studio "isolated shell" modified by Atmel to work with both 8 bit and 32 bit AVR chips. The compiler is the AVR GNU compiler and its toolchain. Since WinAVR is a dead project, Atmel is providing updates to the GNU toolchain so it supports the latest Atmel chips.
Visual Studio is much better than even Eclipse, Netbeans, Codeblocks, Programmer's Notepad, Qt, KDevelope, and a whole bunch of other IDEs I've used in my life.
So what are you waiting for? Move on to greener pastures already.
I'm using it and it's blowing me away. Some things I find missing includes avrdude, but I can add the commands as "external tools", also there's nothing to assist me with fuse bit settings. I'm not about to drop my AVR Project IDE yet but I'm thinking about it.
Installation is an epic long process though, a big download too, just a heads-up.
I thought linux users are the kind of people who loves vim and stuff Just kidding, you can use Eclipse or Netbeans still if you want to ditch Arduino's IDE.
frank26080115:
ATmega2560 is in the list, I'm not sure what you are talking about, did you mean the board template?
Maybe... If I knew what I was talking about...
There does not appear to be any "templates" except for their own board etc... So I decided I would configure a "general" project and compile it... After scratching my head for a while....
I guess I just do not understand their environment... Delphi2007 Architect is more my speed...
I did eventually figure it out and compiled "hello World" of sorts...
Now I guess I have to figure outguess which libraries are there...
Ignorance is a terrible thing... if only the cure were faster...