Steam Annoyances

So yeah, I’m still a bit undecided about Steam. On the one hand, it’s brilliant in that you can readily get new games and updates and such and everything magically happens in the background – the fact that you don’t have to install stuff is amazing. On the other hand, it’s a closed platform that could use a bit of opening up.
Even little things like opening up the chat client – allowing for chat logging etc. (which I’m sure would be handy for clans and such). But not so much that, my grief with Steam is that many times, the platform just doesn’t work. I can’t begin to count the number of times where:

• Client updates get stuck at <random percentage>
• Starting up the client, leaves me sitting at the “signing on to <account name> page” timeout
• Double click on Steam shortcuts and sit perpetually at the <starting game> dialog
• Updates come out. My client knows nothing about them.
• My favorite: first time install onto some Win7 platforms: the install fails to actually copy files to the install path. That’s awesome. Nothing like missing half the install files! Yes, UAC is off, yes running as admin, yes tried 10x more with re-downloaded MSIs to make sure. I keep a copy of the virgin install folder from XP just for this reason.

Before I move on, it’s worth noting that when you download and install steam you’re not actually doing that. You’re downloading a download manager that may (or in some cases, may not) be able to actually finish downloading steam itself. It would be awesome if you know, you could actually download steam for offline install.

These aggravations aside, for the most part, Steam works. When it doesn’t, typically, a steam client update fixes things. Here is where the problem lies. not all the Steam servers will report that you have a steam update available. Not only does their installer/update suck, when you use the “check for client updates” functionality, you might not get an accurate answer.

Luckily, their main website hosts the steam update history which, thankfully, is up to date most of the time. Doing a comparison against the existing steam client can help you know real fast if you have a steam update that you need to get or not.

So, bored out of my mind, I made a quick little app to readily tell you if you have a pending steam update that you may not know about: SteamCheck.

You can run the application as a straight up WPF application (means you need .NET4 Client Profile or newer) and it will provide a reasonably clean interface to show you if you have a pending update or not as well as a dump of the update log for the last few versions. You can also run the application with a /mini switch to skip the UI and just get a dialog box that gives you the final answer.