I'll be making an updated version for as7 during the next few weeks.

The issues are:-

1) Atmel make no effort to support the installer format released for Visual studio 2012. Still using the older 2010 version by default. Causes many support issues because our installer doesn't run especially for people who previously installed atmel 6.2

2) Atmel making no effort to update their gallery. It is not possible to upload the new format installer to their gallery.

3) Atmel 7.0 adds spurious code to new projects which breaks arduino. Visual micro has been adapted to auto remove the code but I don't like visual micro deleting code that it did not create. Seems a strange move by atmel to make it work this way and wasn't an issue in as6

4) The Visual studio shell that atmel include with As7 is out of date and conflicts with the standard Visual Studio installation and causes more support issues or frustration for users.


Summary

Most users don't bother to read documentation and hit problems with the install due to the points above. Nor iks there enough time in life to constantly document the quirks of atmel studio. These issues have impacted my time enormously and slowed down the development of this project. 

Most users do not need or use the device programming features of atmel studio and therefore they are much better suited to visual studio. It would be useful to know which devices you are using that are not available in std. arduino?

So there will be As7 updates but they will only be for the experts, everyone else should avoid until these problems have been resolved. Then it will be a very good Ide.

Visual micro use sthe same config as the arduino ide which is flexible so there is probably an article on the web that explains how to add a programmer to the arduino programmers.txt config system.

You don't say which board or ide you are using.

There was a minor update for atmel 6.2 a couple of weeks ago. Atmel 6.2 and Visual Studio 2010 share the same Visual Micro .msi installer. It's in the visual studio gallery but not yet in the atmel gallery because it's cumbersome to publish through the atmel gallery and anothe release will be available shortly. 6.2 and 2010 will always be on a reduced feature set.

For Atmel Stdudio 7 there will be a new release shortly but might not contain some of the newer visual micro features.