i am not sure what the advantages are of using either Atmel studio 6 ,eclipse +gcc or Avrdude.
seems like studio 6 is more complete but i need some advice which is the preferred option to use .
looking at a range of differing chips to use inc a tiny as well
Did you have a programming question?
Both AS and Eclipse offer real project management that is easy and flexible.
I personally use IAR / CodeBlocks: IAR due to its comformity and CB due to its size / flexibility. IAR offers hardware debugging support and CB doesn't.
AS (both 4.x or 5.x) are also very good but with limited support for older programmers. AS6 is useful only if you use 32-bit avr offering.
I use Atmel Studio 6. I don't know why dhenry says it is only useful for 32-bit AVRs, I've just used it to program an ATtiny85 and I found it excellent.
dc42:
I use Atmel Studio 6. I don't know why dhenry says it is only useful for 32-bit AVRs, I've just used it to program an ATtiny85 and I found it excellent.
Dhenry wrong? That is Blasphemous I say. 
I have just started learning how to Program AVR's myself and I went for Atmel Studio 4 as I understand it Atmel Studio 6 is just an improvement in the IDE you might be better starting with AS4 over AS6 as there are plenty of tutorials covering AS4 ... and according to all the googling I have done AS5 has some problems so AS4 or AS6 .. as for eclipse and AVR dude I tried AVR Dude it was not for me and Eclipse I find that horrendous to use (all down to personal preference in the end) as for GCC, Atmel Studio's toolchain uses GCC and so does AVR dude and I'm sure Eclipse also uses GCC (well depending on plugin I assume) so that's not really an issue.
what you really should Be deciding is C/C++ or ASM for AVR(8/16bit) Programming.
just my 2p's worth
zx
Atmel Studio 6 is just an improvement in the IDE
Not quite.
AS4 is very simple and has a small foot print, but otherwise a piece of @#$% in terms of its user interface - I wouldn't touch it myself.
AVR Studio 5 / Atmel Studio 6 are based on Microsoft products and totally different interface - those who program in VC should recognize that quickly. The user interface is state of the art, but they are bloated - AS6 is far more bloated than AS5 without offering much to AVR programmers to justify that increase, in my view.
Eclipse is just an ide and can be made to work with other compilers.
I have both AS4 and AS6 installed however I have not used AS6 apart from taking a quick look at it .. as it's quite different from AS4 .. I use AS4 as I installed it over a year ago and have jut recently got back into programming for micro controllers.. I am a self taught hobbyist programmer (I do it because I find it interesting) I'll take your word over the differences .. I did notice that it was based on MS's Visual technologies,I do however like Visual C#, so no complaint's there and the Inteli Sense is a huge help however the point I was trying to make was he should perhaps be concentrating on the language rather than the IDE
You could also just use the command line and write your own makefiles.
That's what I do but then I don't use Windows and like to do automated builds.
I find that using GUIs and IDEs for embedded development projects
often just get in the way and have limitations because
they try to make things simpler, often at the expense of hiding things or eliminating
capabilities.
The other nice thing about using the command line tools and make is that the same
working environment and development process
works across many different platforms, OS's and cpus if you use the gnu tools.
Many of the IDEs lock you into their tools and their way of doing thing and sometimes
only work on a particular host OS.
This means that if you need to change target processors, target environments
or host development platforms, it often means having to learn an entirely
new IDE and toolset.
--- bill