Question

Application is a C# .Net 3.5 WCF Service.

I’d like during the build process to dynamically add some build information to the final binary and assemblies that can then be read programatically and sent back to the WCF client when it sends a GetVersionInfo request to the web service.

.Net assembly versioning isn’t enough. I want to include additional string data that contains the state of the system at the time the application was built.

I’m thinking that I’d do this by adding a post build event to call a script to update the app.config file with the data I want. Does this sound about right, or should I be considering some other approach?

Update

I’d additionally like this string to appear in the “Special Build Description” property of the final exe. I.e. I’d like to right click on the file and see this information in the version tab for the file.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I suspect a pre-build event may be more appropriate than post-build… have you considered adding a buildinfo.xml file (or similar) to be built into the assembly as an embedded resource? You could then load it with Assembly.GetManifestResourceStream. That way you don’t need to worry about fitting in with existing files or anything like that – just overwrite buildinfo.xml with a new file in the pre-build step.