How do I get the ClickOnce Publish version to match the AssemblyInfo.cs File version?

Question

Every time I publish the application in ClickOnce I get get it to update the revision number by one. Is there a way to get this change automatically to change the version number in AssemblyInfo.cs file (all our error reporting looks at the Assembly Version)?

Answer 1

We use Team Foundation Server Team Build and have added a block to the TFSBuild.proj's AfterCompile target to trigger the ClickOnce publish with our preferred version number:

<MSBuild Projects="$(SolutionRoot)\MyProject\Myproject.csproj"
         Properties="PublishDir=$(OutDir)\myProjectPublish\;
                     ApplicationVersion=$(PublishApplicationVersion);
                     Configuration=$(Configuration);Platform=$(Platform)"
         Targets="Publish" />

The PublishApplicationVersion variable is generated by a custom MSBuild task to use the TFS Changeset number, but you could use your own custom task or an existing solution to get the version number from the AssemblyInfo file.

This could theoretically be done in your project file (which is just an MSBuild script anyway), but I'd recommend against deploying from a developer machine.

I'm sure other continuous integration (CI) solutions can handle this similarly.

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Edit: Sorry, got your question backwards. Going from the ClickOnce version number to the AssemblyInfo file should be doable. I'm sure the MSBuild Community Tasks (link above) have a task for updating the AssemblyInfo file, so you'd just need a custom task to pull the version number from the ClickOnce configuration XML.

However, you may also consider changing your error reporting to include the ClickOnce publish version too:

if (System.Deployment.Application.ApplicationDeployment.IsNetworkDeployed)
{
    Debug.WriteLine(System.Deployment.Application.ApplicationDeployment.
                                                        CurrentDeployment.CurrentVersion);
}