I was experimenting with the Assembly and File version number. Though my program runs well from the IDE, but after creating a Setup file and installing the application crashes with InvalidDeploymentException.
What should I do to resolve the matter?
A:
Try using the fusion log viewer to see what's not being loaded in your deployed app.
Chris O
2010-05-10 11:08:01
A:
The [AssemblyVersion] and [AssemblyFileVersion] attributes play different roles. [AssemblyVersion] is only visible to managed code and is important for the GAC. Whenever a make a breaking change in the assembly's public interface you should bump this number up.
The compiler embeds an unmanaged resource in an assembly with the /win32res command line option. This includes the VERSIONINFO resource, readable by all unmanaged code, including the shell. It determines what you see when you right-click the assembly in Explorer and look at the Details property page. The "File version" value shown there is set by the [AssemblyFileVersion] attribute. The [AssemblyVersion] value isn't visible there, Explorer doesn't (yet) know how to read that.
It is up to you to decide how to use this attribute. The crash indicates that there's some minimum sanity checking going on in the deployment code, never tried to get it wrong myself to see what would happen. Making them the same would however make a lot of sense.
Microsoft uses [AssemblyFileVersion] a different way, they automatically increment it for each build and nail [AssemblyVersion] down. That's a good idea and the strategy I use. What is however quite ironic is that the automatic version increment feature works exactly backwards, it can only auto-increment [AssemblyVersion]. Sigh.
Hans Passant
2010-05-10 12:16:48