It is more possible with .NET than, perhaps, with anything else. Look at your "AssemblyInfo.cs". It usually has the attribute applied on the assembly level:
[assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.2.3.4")]
You can always write this attribute, modify it according to your versioning policy, etc.
The attribute type uses is
System.Reflection.AssemblyVersionAttribute. Please see:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.reflection.assemblyversionattribute.aspx[
^].
Due to limitation of the attributes, it has a string property
Version, but you can also parse it as a class
System.Version:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.version.aspx[
^].
This type has everything you may need for version management: semantic comparison is defined, it can be serialized/deserialized, converted to string and parsed from string (which you need for using the
AssemblyVersionAttribute. You can use
System.Reflection.Assembly.GetCustomAttributes to check if this attribute defined for any given assembly, if it is, extract the version string and parse as the
Version instance. Please see:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.reflection.assembly.getcustomattributes.aspx[
^].
That's all you need.
Good luck,
—SA
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