"Microsoft finally realized that the point of a computer is to run the user's applications without interruption or long boot times. Therefore, we are rolling out an update system that is transparent to the user and has no forced reboots and long wait times."
What I was really hoping to read with a title like "Introducing Unified Update Platform" is that Microsoft had provided some sort of API for any program to use the same unified update system to check for and install updates, instead of having a million random updaters checking things in Task Scheduler.
They already do it for graphics drivers and so on. Linux does it of course.
But then I guess the problem is Microsoft would need to check everything in case users started blaming Microsoft for "sending them a virus through Windows Update" when RandomDodgyApp got a bad update.
> instead of having a million random updaters checking things in Task Scheduler.
And a million different popups. The main problem I see with this is that some programs (e.g. Razer Synapse) can't be arsed to have an external process do the patching; demanding a reboot. Combine that with the Windows update reboot nag and you have hell on Earth.
Aside: you do have access to BITS[1], which is the download manager that Windows Update uses. According to an MSDN mag article I read years ago it tries to be as unobtrusive as possible (e.g. backing off if you are using your connection).
> What I was really hoping to read with a title like "Introducing Unified Update Platform" is that Microsoft had provided some sort of API for any program to use the same unified update system to check for and install updates, instead of having a million random updaters checking things in Task Scheduler.
There's nothing worse than turning on a machine you've not used for a few weeks and being slammed with update notifications. Updates should be transparent and automatic by default in my opinion as regular users have zero interest in maintenance updates.
Transparent or not, I'd just prefer to have one main program doing the checks vs. a whole bunch of different vendor's ones doing different checks in different ways at different times.
Agree. An updater that wouldn't involve pop up dialog boxes interupting my work or having to opt out again and again of the updater messing with my browser (I am looking at you Java and Skype!).
Something like that for iOS would be nice too. Less intrusive update reminders and not having to go through all of the nagging for apple services everytime Apple pushes a security patch!
No, they work as-is most of the time. You just have to make sure you're not writing to your install folder or try to install services or something like that. The use of UWP APIs instead of/along classic desktop APIs is completely optional (and most of them are supported out of the box even without the bridge, the exception being the APIs that require app identity, like Tiles or supporting a Share Target contract, at least not in a easy way)
It's such a frustrating thing. Rebooting doesn't really take that long on a PC with an SSD, but it's the upheaval of my environment while I'm in the middle of developing that makes that interruption take way too long to recover from. Once you add in loading several solutions in Visual Studio (which is -- even with the improvements in 2015 -- still a ridiculously long process for what amounts to a souped-up text editor), opening up whatever web pages were up, providing needed context, and launching the variety of other applications I need to do my work (Notepad++, Outlook, Skype for Business, Vizio, several terminal services connections, possibly PuTTY and others).
I remember reading in the Server 2003 days how "Hot Patching" was going to be the answer to this. It was so limited (not to mention a possible attack vector) that it basically didn't exist as a viable feature. The only patches that could be applied in this manner had to be patching non-interrelated components, which amounts to almost nothing in the Windows world and since they're now doing patches as a large roll-up component, I'd imagine this is all but dead[1].
[1] Although I was pleased to discover when I installed the last cumulative update for Windows Server 2016 that -- to my shock -- it did not ask me to reboot the server. It was pretty freshly loaded, though, and had almost no roles or features installed so part of me wonders if there was very little to patch in the first place.
I don't disagree with your overall points, but if you're using Visual Studio in such a limited way that you can possibly think of it as a "souped up text editor", you might as well just actually use a souped up text editor - it'll be a lot faster.
Good point and it's my use of Visual Studio that kind of screws me. I've got ReSharper installed, which bogs down the editor quite a bit, as well as an extension that I wrote that isn't nearly as efficient as it should be (adds measurable overhead, but nothing close to what ReSharper adds -- I'm close to having a working update that corrects my mistakes there but it filled a gap I needed filled and I originally wrote it with no intention of releasing it -- plans changed).
Visual Studio is pretty ugly in a lot of ways, though. Writing extensions for Visual Studio exposes the ugly underbelly of the beast, which is basically WPF window dressing laid on top of a whole pile of COM Interop (not all that unusual for an application of its scope and history). There's a lot of legacy there. Generally speaking, I do avoid Visual Studio for a lot of things, favoring everything from VS Code to Notepad++. If I spend too much time in Code, or Sublime, and stay out of Visual Studio, returning to it really hurts. At the same time, for all of its complexity (and probably "because of"), I do almost all of my C# development in it and a good chunk of my C++ development there (even more so after Update 2).
"Rebooting doesn't really take that long on a PC with an SSD"
It's not the rebooting that takes time, it's the "Configuring updates for your Computer" stuff. It'll sit there on shutdown and/or startup like this for... who knows how long. There's no way to know if it's making progress, so you're left trying to guess if the update process has hung. (And this is a far too common occurrence)
Actually does anyone know what is happening when it "configures the update"? The original microsoft post suggests windows update currently simply replaces assemblies. That should take milliseconds on a modern PC.
"Microsoft finally realized that the point of a computer is to run the user's applications without interruption or long boot times. Therefore, we are rolling out an update system that is transparent to the user and has no forced reboots and long wait times."