While I was working on something today, I discovered that one of the utilities I was using was a few versions back from its most current release. Ok, no big deal - in the usual fashion, I went up to the website, downloaded the new version, and away I went. I also had to repeat the process on my laptop, since I had a copy there as well. Then I had to repeat on another box.

At this point, I decided to walk through my ‘utilities’ folder, and start updating my tools to the latest versions, and found that I had TONS of stuff that was out of date.

Ugh - The process of updating software is pretty annoying actually.

This started me wondering: why isn’t there some ‘Software Update’ service on my machine, similar to what Windows Update does? Sure, ‘ClickOnce‘ is coming in Whidbey, or there’s the corporate Software Update Service (not to mention the defunct Software Update Channels part of ‘Active Channels‘), but how many software packages use their own update mechanism instead?

Think about how cool this could be:

• Setup should provide a way for an application installing to register itself as part of a ’software update service’.
• The registration is a URL to a web service (from the ISV) that allows you to get the current version numbers, plus a place it can install a patch or new version from.

A user could then hit ‘Software Update’, and it would contact the appropriate service for each application installed, queue and download the updates.

Anyways, that’s just my 2 cents for today.