Visual Studio will now receive updates from Windows Update

Mads Khristensen of the Visual Studio team  has announced that Microsoft's popular developer software, integrated development environment (IDE) will receive updates via Windows Update. This will help to keep its products safe and stable for users.

The proposed update mechanism will apply to all supported editions of Visual Studio and LTSC channels of Visual Studio 2022, 2019, and 2017. However, it will not be available to pre-release versions of the IDE from Microsoft.

This doesn't mean that updates will ship every new version of Visual Studio on top of the existing one. As you may already know, different versions can co-exist on the same machine. But updates will bring security fixes and stability improvements.

Such updates will bring with them a lot of convenience. Earlier, you had to notice an update notification in Visual Studio, then manually click on it and install the updates. But now it will update itself in the background.

The change will start in August 2024, but it will not become a new default update mechanism. Microsoft will let developers decide how to receive Visual Studio updates. Microsoft will add an option to the Settings app so you will get the ability to enable Visual Studio updates with ease.

What's more, developers will be able to separate Visual Studio updates from the "Get updates for other Microsoft products" switch in the Settings app, so that the option doesn't impact the IDE if that's what the user or IT admin prefers.

To try it right now, you need to apply the following registry tweak to enable Visual Studio updates via Windows Update:

HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\VisualStudio\Setup\

PreviewAutomaticUpdates (REG_DWORD) = 1

To disable this option, you need to change another registry key:

HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\VisualStudio\Setup

VSthroughMUUpdatesOptOut (REG_DWORD) = 1

You can learn more in the official announcement.