C# – Automatically update version number

As far as I know a common solution is to add a ?<version> to the script's src link.

For instance:

<script type="text/javascript" src="myfile.js?1500"></script>

I assume at this point that there isn't a better way than find-replace to increment these "version numbers" in all of the script tags?

You might have a version control system do that for you? Most version control systems have a way to automatically inject the revision number on check-in for instance.

It would look something like this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="myfile.js?$$REVISION$$"></script>

Of course, there are always better solutions like this one.

We use Team Foundation Server Team Build and have added a block to the TFSBuild.proj's AfterCompile target to trigger the ClickOnce publish with our preferred version number:

<MSBuild Projects="$(SolutionRoot)\MyProject\Myproject.csproj"
         Properties="PublishDir=$(OutDir)\myProjectPublish\;
                     ApplicationVersion=$(PublishApplicationVersion);
                     Configuration=$(Configuration);Platform=$(Platform)"
         Targets="Publish" />

The PublishApplicationVersion variable is generated by a custom MSBuild task to use the TFS Changeset number, but you could use your own custom task or an existing solution to get the version number from the AssemblyInfo file.

This could theoretically be done in your project file (which is just an MSBuild script anyway), but I'd recommend against deploying from a developer machine.

I'm sure other continuous integration (CI) solutions can handle this similarly.

Edit: Sorry, got your question backwards. Going from the ClickOnce version number to the AssemblyInfo file should be doable. I'm sure the MSBuild Community Tasks (link above) have a task for updating the AssemblyInfo file, so you'd just need a custom task to pull the version number from the ClickOnce configuration XML.

However, you may also consider changing your error reporting to include the ClickOnce publish version too:

if (System.Deployment.Application.ApplicationDeployment.IsNetworkDeployed)
{
    Debug.WriteLine(System.Deployment.Application.ApplicationDeployment.
                                                        CurrentDeployment.CurrentVersion);
}