R – How to increment automatically the version of an assembly if there are changes on the code

assembliesnetversioningvisual studio

there is a way of incrementing the version number of an assembly automatically if the assembly has changed after doing a build of the solution?

I've tried with post-build events but then you increment the version on each build, not only if the build process has compiled anything due to changes.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT: What I want to do is to automatically increment the version number of the assemblies where I change code each time that I do a "Build Solution" to avoid changing it by hand. This way I can be sure that 2 assemblies with the same version ALWAYS have the same code.

Best Answer

Yes, you can get automatic version incrementing by using * in the [AssemblyVersion] attribute. Unfortunately, that is rarely correct. What Microsoft should have done is give the [AssemblyFileVersion] that capability. They didn't.

[AssemblyVersion] is a very important attribute, used by the CLR to verify that the assembly that got loaded is compatible with the assembly that was used when the code was compiled. "Compatible" means: the assembly is going to work cleanly with the client code, no changes were made to the assembly source code that could make it fail to work correctly if the client wasn't recompiled. Using that definition, a bug fix update is very compatible. An update that reorganized the internal implementation of the classes in the assembly could be very compatible as well. Changes to publicly visible classes or members is likely to not be compatible. Although the JIT compiler is very good at detecting when the changes were grossly incompatible (like removing a previously public member).

Using * in the attribute essentially means: it is always incompatible. Even if you didn't change any code at all, the assembly will be incompatible after it is built again. That's pretty useless in most any scenario, except if you always build the assembly together with its client code. And redeploy them together. That works, but then the notion of having a version number at all becomes fairly useless.

Long story short: IMO you should manage the assembly version yourself. Change it when you make a breaking change in the public interface of the assembly. That's certainly the approach that Microsoft takes. .NET 2.0 assemblies are still marked as version 2.0.0.0 in the .NET 3.5 SP1 framework. Even though they are not actually compatible anymore, WaitHandle.WaitOne(int) got added later. They did otherwise a stellar job of maintaining compatibility for the past 5 years, it couldn't have been easy.

Note that none of this applies to [AssemblyFileVersion], auto incrementing it for every build is very appropriate.

Related Solutions

Javascript – How to force clients to refresh JavaScript files

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.

C# – How to get the path of the assembly the code is in

I've defined the following property as we use this often in unit testing.

public static string AssemblyDirectory
{
    get
    {
        string codeBase = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().CodeBase;
        UriBuilder uri = new UriBuilder(codeBase);
        string path = Uri.UnescapeDataString(uri.Path);
        return Path.GetDirectoryName(path);
    }
}

The Assembly.Location property sometimes gives you some funny results when using NUnit (where assemblies run from a temporary folder), so I prefer to use CodeBase which gives you the path in URI format, then UriBuild.UnescapeDataString removes the File:// at the beginning, and GetDirectoryName changes it to the normal windows format.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Javascript – How to force clients to refresh JavaScript files

C# – How to get the path of the assembly the code is in

Related Topic