Clever Geek Handbook

How do you use the service pack or hotfix?

If your application has an open API that people are developing against what you do in the following scenarios?

  • If you publish a service pack of your app, do you change the version number of assemblies?

  • Likewise, do you change the version number if you provide a hot fix?

If you do, do you provide policy files for assembly redirection? or if you don't use policy files in the script? When would I choose not to change the version number or provide a policy file and change the version?

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You only need to update the version number if the methods have changed, etc. public api, or if calling behavior has changed so that the client may need to rewrite some of their code that your api uses.



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We follow the rule that the first three parts of the version number are more or less artificial numbers generated by marketing. The template is similar to "Major.Minor.ServicePack". (The difference between a service pack and a hotfix is ​​just politics.) But the last number is automatically inserted into the build script and keeps the last modified subordinate revision of the branch the script is running on. This allows us to always find the exact code base for any out-of-the-box binary.



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The reason for leaving the version number unchanged is due to the strong assembly names.

If you want to allow an already compiled application to use an updated assembly with a strong name, you cannot change the version number, as the application will need the same version of the assembly it was compiled with.

This, of course, is only done if the build interfaces have not changed.

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Microsoft's way is to use Major.Minor.BuildNumber.Revision . I would suggest automatically generating and using BuildNumber.Revision for service packs and hot fixes. I would manually change and use Minor build number for API extensions. I would manually change and use the major line when changing things to a non-backward compatible way, or making significant (30% or more) changes or functionality enhancements.

Jeff Atwood has a blog post from the Stone Age about version numbering and has a question here about automatically incrementing the version number and I like the answer related to Adding Visual Studio to Visual Studio .

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