Arduino on SAMD20 Xplained pro

Hello,

I am an Arduino enthusiast and I am keen to migrate from Arduino boards into boards that are bit more generic and powerful. I have a SAMD20 Xplained development board and I want to program it in Arduino fashion. I have tried few different approached and haven't had much success. There are all that comes to my mind,

Approach 1 : Use the Arduino IDE and select board as Arduino Zero and upload the program. Not sure if this would work, as the new board maynot have the arduino bootloader on it. How do I burn the bootloader on a board that is not arduino compatible?

Approach 2 : Use Atmel AVR Studio and start a solution from a Arduino project, let AVR studio convert the program and then upload it. I have not had a lot of success with this. Any advice greatly appreciated.

Approach 3: Use Visualmicro with AVR Studio and upload the Arduino project. No success either.

Please advice me on which one would be the easiest and the steps involved. I really like programming in Arduino and the many libraries that are available. Please help me!

Thanks,
Kailash

Approach 4: Use AS and port the Arduino libraries across.

This is what I'm doing with the G55 Xplained board. Depends on your skill level though.

Graynomad:
Approach 4: Use AS and port the Arduino libraries across.

This is what I'm doing with the G55 Xplained board. Depends on your skill level though.

Thanks. Do you mean moving on to programming in C/C++ from scratch in Atmel studio? I thought about it. I assume it is a difficult learning curve. Is it worth it, given programming in arduino can be much simpler?