Question about stk 500 (atmel)

I received mine yesterday. Of course it would have been nice if, ahem,
the sales rep told me that I needed my own 10-15VDC regulated power
supply. But anyway, it is now up and running and I was able to find a
program that would light the LED's in a different manner then they were
when they came, ie without pushing the buttons.

My question is, after I wrote the program in bascom and compiled it, I
tried simulating it. I could see the lines being stepped thru, but
nothing was happening on the board. So I pressed "enable/disable"
hardware simulation, but one time I got an error "monitor not found",
and the next time I got an error "com port 4 not found". I know it uses
com port 4 because when I set up the atmel studio 4, that's the com
port it assigned to the stk500. I only have 2, and the other one is
already in use.

So I went back into avrstudio 4 and established connection with the stk
500, by pressing the connect icon. It showed me that I had a ATmega
8515 chip in the socket, but I just wasn't thinking (it is really a
AT90s8515), so I pressed the erase button and it erased the chip. Then
it asked me for a hex file to program into the chip.

I went to where my compiled bascom files were and double clicked on the
only .hex file there was, pressed the program button (this is in
avrstudio4 now) and it immediately programmed the chip.

Now I thought we were supposed to be able to do all this right from
bascom. I believe I set all the right links up in bascom, at least per
the manual, but if this is how it should be done, that's OK too.

I was just wondering if this is how everyone does it. You create your
hex file in bascom, and then go to avrstudio and program that into the
chip?

Oh and one more thing. When I specify the chip to be the AT90s8515, for
some reason, I get an error when I try  to program it.

I also received an ATmega16 chip along with the stk 500. I'm really not
sure when I will get to that one. I'm having too much fun with this
now.

TIA,
Joe