VS2005: How to automatically generate a build number with date?

Question

I have a .net 2.0 C# application in Visual Studio 2005 for which I'd like to automatically generate the correct version build number which should contain a number that allows me to guess the build date of the application.
I tried to use the 'AssemblyInfo Task' tool from Microsoft but by default this tool doesn't work. For today it would generate a build number '090227' which exceeds the maximum of 65535 and thus geneartes an error.

I could also live with a build number which contains the year and the day in the year, like 09001 for January 1 2009...
Do you know any solution for this problem?
Do I have to update the source code for this 'AssemblyInfo Task' or would this be possible to achieve in VS2008 or so?
Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

You'll want to look at msbuildtasks. It is an open source set of msbuild tasks. The module has a task to increment/modify/etc a build number. It's also super easy to use and super easy to extend.

Answer 2

msbuildtasks didn't solve my problem. As explained in the description I need a special format. Also the documentation for msbuildtasks is well... go find it.
I've modified the source code for AssemblyInfo Task by adding a new increment type 'YearAndDay' with my needs:

case IncrementMethod.YearAndDay:
{
    DateTime dDate = DateTime.Now;
    long buildNumber = dDate.Year % 2000 * 1000;
    buildNumber += dDate.DayOfYear;
    string newVersionNumber = buildNumber.ToString();
    Log.LogMessage(MessageImportance.Low, logMessage, newVersionNumber);
    return newVersionNumber;
}

Seemed to be the simplest solution.

Answer 3

The default automatic build number generated by VS/C#/msbuild is the number of days since 1.1.2000 and the release number is the number of two second increments since midnight, so that you can compute the date and time of the build backwards like this:

new DateTime(2000, 1, 1).AddDays(assemblyName.Version.Build).AddSeconds(assemblyName.Version.Revision*2)