Microsoft Visual Studio will support automatic updates

An announcement from the Microsoft Developer Community showed that starting from August, Visual Studio will obtain security updates through Microsoft Update (MU).

This system is designed to run in the background in a non-intrusive way. This means that any PC that has opted in to “receive updates for other Microsoft products” will automatically receive and install Visual Studio updates. We strongly recommend that you enable this feature as it is the easiest way to keep your Visual Studio installation secure and up to date.

Microsoft says this feature is only available for supported release and LTSC versions of Visual Studio 2022, Visual Studio 2019, and Visual Studio 2017, and not for Visual Studio Preview versions.

Enable automatic updates

To enable this feature, you need to open Windows Update, select “Advanced options”, and then enable the “Receive updates for other Microsoft products” option

Disable automatic updates

If you have turned on “Receive updates for other Microsoft products” but do not want to receive Visual Studio updates through this channel, you can opt out of updates and exclude Visual Studio updates from MU by manually configuring the following registry key:

June and July Previews

To allow users to experience this feature before its official release in August, Microsoft will also provide Visual Studio update packages through system updates in June and July.

However, as above, to join this experience channel, you also need to manually configure the registry and check Visual Studio updates through MU.

Microsoft Visual Studio

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