Good practice to make the .exe and .dll have the same version?

Question

For a new release I increase the version number of the executable, should I make all the dll have the same version number as the executable even if the dll is not updated at all?

Answer 1

Keeping the DLL version #'s the same make it easier to verify that a customer has a consistent install. To achieve this, in MSVC++ You can include the version numbers in a header file that is included into the .rc file so that you only need define the version # in one place. You probably don't want to include the build # (the 4th number in the version) in this so that you can patch DLL's individually. I put the build # in a per-DLL header file to do this.

Answer 2

Only recommended if your product is bundled as single package like .msi or .cab file. Otherwise it will make your partial updates too heavy as that will require all the binaries to be updated even if they are not required to.