Versioning Controlled Build v1.3 Review

By Andrew Sutton

Introduction

Versioning Controlled Build (VCB) is a Visual Studio (VS) Add-On. It is written in C#. VCB provides a GUI mechanism for handling VS .NET version control. VCB uses the AssemblyInfo.* file (either VB or C# extension) AssemblyVersion attribute for storing the Major, Minor, Build & Revision numbers.

Note that you will need to follow the standard versioning structure of Major.Minor.Build.Revision for VCB to work correctly.

Installation

The download was a mere 76K and installation was from an msi file that took less than a minute. When I next started VS and loaded a project I found an entry under the Build menu. There was also a new Build toolbar available.

Use

When you want to increment the version number of your project just display the VCB GUI via the toolbar or menu entry. The GUI gives you a number of options for incrementing the revision number. By a simple button press you can increment the Major, Minor or Build revision number. You can then save this new revision number into the AssemblyInfo file, and build the project (in which case the Revision number is incremented).

There are a number of options you can set including whether to use Microsoft’s Date & Time based Build & Revision numbering scheme, whether Build numbers are reset when the Major or Minor version number is incremented, whether the Revision number is reset when the Major, Minor or Build numbers are incremented, and also whether to apply the Assembly version number to the File & Product version. numbers.

VCB also claims to be able multiple project versioning within a solution but as I currently am using single project solutions I was unable to test this option out.

Conclusion

This is an excellent tool that saves having to remember to manually edit the AssemblyInfo file each time you want to change a project’s version. The GUI provides a way of automating the increment of the revision number each time you build the project via the GUI and at the same time giving you an easy way of incrementing either the Major, Minor or Build revision. I have no hesitation rating this VS Add-On 5/5.