A five-year-old Visual Studio feature request for automatic IDE updates is finally getting enacted by Microsoft amid a lot of initial developer pushback, seemingly misplaced.
It’s NOT off by default. It’s on/off according to the setting you have for “Receive updates for other Microsoft products. Get Microsoft Office and other updates together with Windows updates”. If you have that on, then auto VS-updating will ALSO be on. The controversy is no developers want auto-VS updating on, even if they DO have that other setting on. Auto-updating Office and auto-updating VS aren’t the same thing at all. I for one never update Windows and VS at the same time, because if something breaks in your app, then how do you know which update broke it if you did them at the same time?
So, they’re going to add an option for VS to update itself automatically, and leave that disabled by default?
This sounds entirely benign and useful. Unironically. What is the controversy here?
It’s NOT off by default. It’s on/off according to the setting you have for “Receive updates for other Microsoft products. Get Microsoft Office and other updates together with Windows updates”. If you have that on, then auto VS-updating will ALSO be on. The controversy is no developers want auto-VS updating on, even if they DO have that other setting on. Auto-updating Office and auto-updating VS aren’t the same thing at all. I for one never update Windows and VS at the same time, because if something breaks in your app, then how do you know which update broke it if you did them at the same time?