Should I auto-increment the assembly version when I build my software?

Question

In Visual Studio 2003, you could easily set your project assembly to auto-increment every time you built it, but with Visual Studio 2005, this functionality was removed. You can still auto-increment your assembly version on every build, but it's a complicated custom build step instead of an integrated feature.

I'm not sure why this was removed, but here's a question I should have asked a while ago - Should I be using a workaround to continue to auto-increment when I build, or is there a good reason to stop doing this, in favor of manually incrementing? Since Microsoft removed it from VS, perhaps there's a good reason, and I'm wondering if anybody knows it.

Answer 1

I personally prefer not to do it since I at the moment work on a project where I need to be able to know exactly what features where added to exactly what version and if it autoincremented every time I built it would increase too rapidly.

However, I think it depends on your project if the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. Here's an old MS Patterns page that discusses advantages vs disadvantages of the built in auto incrementation:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee817676.aspx

Answer 2

No, auto-increment on the [AssemblyVersion] is supported in VS2005 and up. Make it look like this:

 [assembly: AssemblyVersion("2.0.*")]

I have little use for this capability myself. [AssemblyVersion] describes the outward visible public interface for an assembly. That doesn't change when I simply rebuild the assembly. [AssemblyFileVersion] is appropriate for tracking build numbers. Sadly, it does not have the auto-increment capability. Note how the .NET assemblies use that version numbering strategy as well.

Also note this feedback item.