I'm in the same predicament as you it seems :) I once built a logging system into the app that the user could turn on/off if they were having issues and it wou

I'm in the same predicament as you it seems :) I once built a logging system into the app that the user could turn on/off if they were having issues and it would at least record what they were doing at the time and they could send it to me for review. It captured usage and exception info so I could narrow it down pretty quickly but getting them to use it was impossible unless they called and I asked them to do it. I'm not sure I'd like to be bombarded with user data from all my users though. I now think a better system would be to build in a bug/feature reporting tool and put it front and centre on the menu or toolbar etc to encourage them to use it. Create the form with as many default values for fields as you can to make the report as specific as possible with just one area to describe the bug. There's not much you can do about updates/patches, I just issue an email and flag them as normal or very important which at least gives the user a choice of when to install them. For new features, I'm working on building in an interpreter for Clojure (I'm using C# as the main app language but using say Lua or building a simple Lisp interpreter isn't too hard). I want these new features to be 'plug-ins' rather than issue new releases all the time. It will also give the end user a chance to automate what they need specifically if they are inclined and able, saves me some work for little reward :) It also keeps the main 'engine' code smaller and maintainable, once you have the engine a majority of features are just automation anyway.