VS2005: how to automatically generate build number with date?

Question

I have a .net 2.0 C # application in Visual Studio 2005 for which I would 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 using the "AssemblyInfo Task" tool from Microsoft, but by default this tool does not work. To date, it will generate assembly number "090227", which exceeds a maximum of 65535 and, therefore, generates an error.

I could also live with an assembly number that contains year and day in year, for example, 09001 on January 1, 2009 ...
Do you know any solution to this problem?
Should I update the source code for this "AssemblyInfo Tasks", or could this be achieved on VS2008 or so?
Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

msbuildtasks did not solve my problem. As explained in the description, I need a special format. Also, the documentation for msbuildtasks is good ... find it.
I changed the source code of the AssemblyInfo Task by adding a new type of increment '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;
}

This seemed to be the easiest solution.

Answer 2

You want to see msbuildtasks . This is an open source msbuild task suite. The module has the task of increasing / changing / etc assembly number. It is also very easy to use and super easy to expand.

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 you can calculate the build date and time in the opposite direction:

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