You have seen a file named "AssemblyInfo.cs (or .vb according to your programming language)" in your projects. This file contains information about the output assembly of your project such as Author's Name, Copyright Notice, ... and Assembly Version. By default assembly version is set to 1.0.0.0. This version declaration shows major.minor.build.revision numbers of your assembly. Two first numbers are commonly constant e.g. 2.0. Third number follows YYMMDD rule (of build date) and the last number is build counter.

It is a good idea to change assembly version and use it in your application. For example you can show Application Version to the end user. It's so easy, take a look:

Assembly assembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();
string version = assembly.GetName().Version.ToString();

 But one thing that I was interested in was "How to tell Visual Studio 2005 change assembly version in an auto increment behavior?"

After I googled this issue I found a solution on MSBuild Team Blog. They built an AssemblyInfoTask on GotDotNet.com. It's so easy to be integrated in your project. Just download the required package and run it. It will install AssemblyInfoTask in your GAC or Application Data folder (depending on your choice). Then you should add this single line of code to your project file after last <Import> tag:

<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\AssemblyInfoTask\Microsoft.VersionNumber.targets"/>

or this one (if you installed it in Data Application folder):

<Import Project="$(APPDATA)\Microsoft\MSBuild\AssemblyInfoTask\Microsoft.VersionNumber.Targets"/>

Everything is done now! Your Assembly Version will change automatically based on the rules I said before.

Because Setup file and updated help file of this project are located on GotDotNet.com and you should login to this site and also join this project to download them, I uploaded Setup package and updated Help file for you. Find them below:

Downlod: Setup Package | Updated Help File

 

Microsoft released beta 1.1 version of CSS friendly ASP.NET 2.0 control adapters Beta 1.1. This is a free tool let you force your server side controls render html output as you like based on CSS technology. As is read on its web site:

"ASP.NET is a great technology for building web sites but it would be even better if it rendered different HTML. For example, the Menu control makes it simple to add a menu to a web site but it would be better if it didn't create <table> tags and was easier to style using CSS. Happily, it's easy to "teach" the Menu control how to generate the kind of HTML that you prefer. Indeed, you can modify any ASP.NET control so it produces better HTML.

The key is to use something that may be new to you: control adapters. These are little chunks of logic that you add to your web site to effectively "teach" an ASP.NET control how to render better HTML."

You can download it for ASP.NET 2.0 here. Also you can find a complete guide and some live examples here.

 

Microsoft released Anti-Cross Site Scripting (XSS) Library V1.0 for .NET framework [Details]

I think after SQL Injection, XSS is the second vulnerability which many web sites are infected to and so this tool can help (and awake!) many developers control this danger in their codes.

As said on download page of this library, current downloadable package only contains .NET 2.0 binaries and 1.x versions are due to release in future (Bad news :(( I still have to use 1.x version in some projects).

More information about XSS can be found here.

UPDATE: Library updated! Now it supports both .NET 2.0 and 1.x.

 

Brian Goldfarb has collected a list of must see "How Do I" video series for ASP.NET 2.0. (Total download size: 198 MB)

 

MSDN Magazine Special Issue: Visual Studio 2005 Guided Tour.

Download: PDF (21.1 MB) | CHM | Code

 

Microsoft released PetShop 4.0. As you may know, PetShop is a web application designed to show the best practices for building enterprise, n-tier web solutions using Microsoft .NET technology. The previous version (PetShop 3.0) was a major different release because Microsoft team intoruced a model for PetShop that both SQL Server 2000 and Oracle databases were supported.

In this new version PetShop uses Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Oracle 10g Database.

It's a few months that I am using PetShop coding and project model in my own web applications and I think that this model gives all web developers a better feel to develop their projects.

As you can read here, PetShop 4.0 is a good practice for those who want to migrate from ASP.NET 1.x to 2.0 and want to keep their coding style as modern as possible.

If you used PetShop 3.0 before and want to migrate your .NET Framework I suggest you download it right now!

Microsoft PetShop 4.0: Information | Download

 

I recently wrote a post about i18n in ASP.NET. Today while I was searching for some better articles about this issue I found Microsoft Middle East MSDN site. This web site is built to help middle eastern developers which their native language is Arabic. Since Persian language, like Arabic, is a right-to-left (RTL) language I think many articles and resources on this web site can help Persian developers build more internationalized windows and web applications. Don't miss it!

UPDATE: Dr. International blog and Microsoft Global Dev. are also interesting :D

 

Microsoft released Beta 2 version of Internet Explorer 7: Home | Download | Tour | Blog.