Will Windows Update modify anything in Visual Studio?

(Note: Yes, the technical side of this question seems to be rather SuperUser, but the implications are more relevant for StackOverflow readers.)

As the title says, we are wondering if (fully) enabling automated Windows Updates on our developer machines will have implications for MS Visual Studio. That is, will any fixes to any components (be it libraries, UI/IDE, compiler, ...) ever be updated through Windows Update?

We want to have 100% exact and reproducible developm开发者_运维知识库ent environments (wrt C++) on all developer machines, and so we are concerned that automated Windows updates may introduce some uncontrolled updates into our development chain.

If you enable just Windows Updates it should update only Windows (and Windows-related components), while enabling Microsoft Updates should enable automatic updates for all the supported Microsoft software (including VS).

However, even just Windows Update should apply security updates to the .NET Framework and maybe to the C++ runtime, so it may affect you as well.

Still, if you update all your machines together (maybe with WSUS, which allows you to approve/block every single update for distribution on the machines of the domain) you shouldn't get any discrepancies between the various machines.

Notice that I'm not completely sure of all this (I'm not actively working on Windows at the moment), so if there are errors just tell me in the comments, I'll be glad to fix them (or to delete the answer if it turns out to be complete nonsense :)).

First Windows Update must be set to update all Microsoft products and not only Windows. This setting will check for updates for products like Office and Visual Studio amongst them see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Update#Microsoft_Update However from my experience updates to Visual Studio through Windows Update consist mostly of security issues, all other updates+fixes are to be installed manually.

So basically you can either turn off Windows Update completely (not recommended), or just set it to update Windows only and not all the MS products installed on the system.

It was quite common issue with VS 2008 - it updated itself via Windows Update and become uncompatible with its own Setup - it could not be removed or modified via the official setup program, unofficial utility had to be used.

I hope this will not be the case with VS 2010. I haven't noticed any updates to it via Windows Update yet (but I have them enabled). Microsoft certainly promised updates - at least C++/CLI IntelliSense support.