Question

I’m not even sure if versioning is the right word for it, but it’ll have to do. I want to start putting a ‘Version x.x.xx’ note on our internal apps by request of our users, so they have a rough of idea of when it gets updated (and in the future, make that a link that shows changes). It seems like using the AssemblyInfo.cs file is a good idea – it lets you automatically update the build+revision which is nice (for the .DLL of the web application).

Is this a decent approach? Then whenever I reach the major/minor version milestones for my app. I can just update those manually, correct? All of this assumes I can actually get the version information from my app. somehow, which I haven’t a clue how to do either.

Answer 1

We do the same thing in our application. Although you can add the version number manually, our version info is added to the assembly as part of our automated build process (we use a customized TFS 2008 service), which I highly recommend. Here’s the control we use (we just put this at the bottom of the master page):

public class BuildVersion : WebControl
{
    /// <summary>
    /// Render override
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="writer"></param>
    protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)
    {
        writer.Write("<!--");
        writer.Write("Version: ");
        writer.Write(GetAssemblyVersion());
        writer.Write("-->");
    }

    private string GetAssemblyVersion()
    {
        try
        {
            Object[] atts = Assembly.GetAssembly(this.GetType()).GetCustomAttributes(true);
            foreach (Object o in atts)
            {
                if (o.GetType() == typeof(AssemblyVersionAttribute))
                {
                    return ((AssemblyVersionAttribute)o).Version;
                }
            }
            return String.Empty;
        }
        catch
        {
            return "Failed to load assembly";
        }
    }
}