Automatically increment "minimum required version" in a ClickOnce deployment?

Question

Is there a way to automatically increment the "minimum required version" fields in a ClickOnce deployment to always equal the current build number? Basically, I always want my deployment to be automatically updated at launch.

I suspect I'm going to need a some pre-/post-build events, but I hope there's an easier way.

Answer 1

I may be a little late with answering this one but I found it difficult to find the solution on google but eventually figured it out so thought I would share.

With MSBuild version 4 (VS2010 and VS2012) this can be achieved by inserting the following target:

  <Target Name="AutoSetMinimumRequiredVersion" BeforeTargets="GenerateDeploymentManifest">
    <FormatVersion Version="$(ApplicationVersion)" Revision="$(ApplicationRevision)">
      <Output PropertyName="MinimumRequiredVersion" TaskParameter="OutputVersion"  />
    </FormatVersion>
    <FormatVersion Version="$(ApplicationVersion)" Revision="$(ApplicationRevision)">
      <Output PropertyName="_DeploymentBuiltMinimumRequiredVersion" TaskParameter="OutputVersion"  />
    </FormatVersion>
  </Target>

The $(ApplicationVersion) is the same setting that you can set manually in the project's Publish window in the VS IDE, with the revision part set to an asterisk. The $(ApplicationRevision) is the actual revision being used for the published version. The FormatVersion task is a built-in MSBuild task that formats the two into a single full version number.

This will set the 'Minimum Required Version' to be the same as the 'Publish Version' therefore ensuring that the new deployment will always be installed by users, ie no option to Skip the update.

Of course, if you don't want to set the minimum required version to the publish version and want to use a different source property then it is straight-forward to amend the target, but the principle is the same.