every time seems exaggerated (given that even something major as Visual Studio installs without requiring a restart). Would be like saying Debian always needs a restart after a bunch of updates. Yes it does sometimes, it doesn't on other times.
tip if you want even less restarting on Windows after installing (and less registry rot): always look for portable versions, if you can't find them first just try to get it yourself by extracting from the installer. You'd be surprised for how many installers this wor. Some installers you can just open in 7Zip/UniExtract and the likes and extract, others can be extracted using msiexec /a PathToMSIFile /qb TARGETDIR=DirectoryToExtractTo
Yeah, I guess it's not every time anymore, to the extent that developers tend to just package copies of all their app's dependencies with the installer, rather than try to update a shared DLL that may be locked by another program.
Which version do you have of VS that installs without requiring a restart? Because I have vs2013 ultimate and each time I install it in a new machine I have to restart it (maybe two times if I have also to activate hyper-v)
2013 pro; IIRC it was the same for 2012 pro, rest is too long ago to remember but I'm pretty sure it hasn't been like that always :]. You got me thinking now though: I don't think I ever installed on a fresh machine without any previous installations of VS where possibly the prerequisites would require a restart.
tip if you want even less restarting on Windows after installing (and less registry rot): always look for portable versions, if you can't find them first just try to get it yourself by extracting from the installer. You'd be surprised for how many installers this wor. Some installers you can just open in 7Zip/UniExtract and the likes and extract, others can be extracted using msiexec /a PathToMSIFile /qb TARGETDIR=DirectoryToExtractTo