Shared AssemblyInfo for uniform versioning across the solution

I've read about this technique: Shared assembly info in VS projects - JJameson's blog

Basically it means to create a SharedAssemblyInfo.cs with versioning information about the assembly, and adding this file as Link to all projects of the solution, so the actual file resides only in 1 location on disk.

My question deals with 2 scenarios:

1. Existing solution that doesn't use this mechanism: Is there a way to easily add the ShareAssemblyInfo to all projects? (lets say i have a solution with 50 projects).

2. When creating a new project, by default a new AssemblyInfo.cs is created. However i'd like to link automatically to the SharedAssemblyInfo as well.

Is there any solution for this? what is the common practice?

It is possible to link to a shared assembly info file in VS 2010. Ashish Jain has a good blog post about it: Sharing assembly version across projects in a solution.

After creating the shared assembly info file at the solution level, his instructions for linking to it from a project are:

> 1. Right click on the project, in which you wish to add the Shared > assembly file, and select Add -> Existing Item... >
> 2. Select the file “SharedAssemblyInfo.cs” from the solution folder. >
> 3. Instead of Add, click on the the arrow next to Add and click “Add as > Link” >
> 4. Drag down the added linked file alongside AssemblyInfo.cs in the > same folder. >
> 5. Repeat steps 1 – 4 for all projects for which you wish to add shared > assembly file.

I've tried this and it works.

First point could be solved with simple text editor that could handle several files at once and find/replace. Just open all of your csproj in it and replace string <Compile Include="Properties\AssemblyInfo.cs" /> with

<Compile Include="..\SharedAssemblyInfo.cs">
  <Link>Properties\SharedAssemblyInfo.cs</Link>
</Compile>

Alternatively you could write a utility like that:

var files = Directory.GetFiles(yourSolutionDir, "*.csproj", SearchOption.AllDirectories);
foreach (var f in files) {
  string contents = File.ReadAllText(f);
  string result = contents.Replace("<Compile Include=\"Properties\\AssemblyInfo.cs\" />", putSecondStringHere_ItIsJustTooLong); // :)
  File.WriteAllText(f, contents);
}

As for the second question... You could take a look at Visual Studio custom project templates , but I'm not sure it worth the efforts. You should IMO write test that will check this instead. It will be much simpler and outcome is actually almost the same.

UPD: About writing tests for checking solution/project files against some custom rules. Basically, sln/csproj format is simple enough to be parseable without much efforts. So if you want to have SharedAssemblyInfo.cs linked into every project - just parse csproj's and check that. Then put that checker in your build server and run it on each build. We have such system working currently and it costs something about two days to write but saved us many more (we have there more sophisticated rules and multi-solution project, so it was worth the efforts).

I won't write about this checking in detail here right now (it is not that short), but I'm going to write blog post about it soon - most probably till the end of this week. So, if you're interested - just check my blog soon :)

UPD: Here it is.

I have created an application to increment the file version automatically.

1. Download Applicaiton
2. add the following line to pre-build event command line

C:\temp\IncrementFileVersion.exe $(SolutionDir)\Properties\AssemblyInfo.cs Build the project To keep it simple the app only throws messages if there is an error, to confirm it worked fine you will need to check the file version in 'Assembly Information'

Note : You will have to reload the solution in Visual studio for 'Assembly Information' button to populate the fields, however your output file will have the updated version.

For suggestions and requests please email me at [email protected]

This does not work for solution that has both C# and F# projects. c# project cannot reference shared f# file and vice versa.

The only option in this case is to make a separate project and refer to it from other projects