Please see my comment to the question. It means, in the order or writing: major, minor, build, revision. First in a list is most significant component, last one is the least significant; this ordering by significance is expressed in the natural ordering of instances of this class through the implementation of the
comparison operators for this class. Please see:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.version%28v=vs.110%29.aspx[
^].
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_theory[
^].
Those words ("major", "minor"…) don't carry any special meaning. Note that they reflect Windows versioning approach which is most usually also used in other OS; it is not specific to .NET. For example, any
file system object also gets such four version components. The components can be used to implement any reasonable versioning policy. The question "how does it work" is not definitive enough, not clear what is your concern.
Probably you can understand the operation using version objects if you understand how .NET
attributes work:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata_%28CLI%29[
^],
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa288454%28v=vs.71%29.aspx[
^] (obsolete article, but good enough for understanding of the subject).
See also:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.reflection.assemblyversionattribute%28v=vs.110%29.aspx[
^],
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.reflection.assemblyfileversionattribute%28v=vs.110%29.aspx[
^],
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.attribute%28v=vs.110%29.aspx[
^].
Any questions about that?
—SA
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