"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."
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.
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.
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!
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).
[1]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...
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].
[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/897341 and https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/freik/2006/03/07/what-does-...
[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.
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).
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)