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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-20T02:30:03+00:00

(Note: Yes, the technical side of this question seems to be rather SuperUser, but

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(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 development 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.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    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 :)).

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