Unique Assembly name every build

Question

I’m trying to change the Assembly name of my dll during build. I’ve created another exe that changes the assembly name in the csproj file, which I execute during pre-build. But it seems like my changes to the csproj file only take effect after the build has finished, which is of course not what I want.

The assembly name has to be unique every time it gets built, so I create it by appending a GUID.

var xmlDoc = XDocument.Load(projectFile);
XNamespace ns = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003";
string newAssemblyName = originalAssemblyName + "_" + Guid.NewGuid().ToString("N");

xmlDoc.Element(ns + "Project").Element(ns + "PropertyGroup").Element(ns + "AssemblyName").Value = newAssemblyName;

xmlDoc.Save(projectFile);

I was wondering if there is maybe a way to ‘force’ reload the csproj during pre-build or if there is another way I could get a unique assembly name everytime I build my solution.

Answer 1

I had some success doing this inside the csproj file in VS2013:

<Project ToolsVersion="12.0" DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
[...]
  <PropertyGroup>
    <MyNewGuid>$([System.Guid]::NewGuid())</MyNewGuid>
  </PropertyGroup>
[...]
  <AssemblyName>$(MyNewGuid)</AssemblyName>

At least, every time I do a Rebuild it appears to generate an assembly with a different GUID for a name.

If you are using an especially old version of msbuild, you might want to look here for an alternative way to create GUIDs: http://phoebix.com/2013/08/08/who-got-the-func-part-3-generating-a-guid-in-msbuild/