What is the best way to use assembly versioning attributes?

Question

The AssemblyVersion and AssemblyFileVersion attributes are the built-in way of handling version numbers for .NET assemblies. While the framework provides the ability to have the

Answer 1

At a previous job, where we used Subversion, I had a nant script run about ccnet to extract the repository version and used that as the final number.

At this job, we use VSS (shutter), so that's not really an option, so we have a policy of updating it manually, with the following guidelines:

• Major : significant ( > 25%) changes or addition in functionality or interface.
• Minor : small changes or additions in functionality or interface.
• Build : minor changes that break the interface.
• Revision: fixes to a build which do not change the interface.

We also keep the Assembly & the File versions in sync. The Assembly version can be easily read programmatically, while the file version can be displayed as a column in Details mode in Windows Explorer.

Answer 2

I see many posts here about using the subversion revision number as a component of the assembly version. Beware: the 4 version numbers available in windows (a.b.c.d) are each limited to 16 bit (max = 65535). The subversion revision number can easily exceed this limit, especially if you host multiple projects in the same repository.