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Publish Version

The Publish Version section sets the version of your application that's stored in the ClickOnce manifest file. This isn't the same as the assembly version, which you can set in the Application tab, although you might set both to match.

The key difference is that the publish version is the criteria that's used to determine whether a new update is available. If a user launches version 1.5.0.0 of an application and version 1.5.0.1 is available, the ClickOnce infrastructure will show the update dialog box (Figure B-7).

By default, the Automatically Increment Revision with Each Publish check box is set, in which case the final part of the publish version (the revision number) is incremented by 1 after each publication, so 1.0.0.0 becomes 1.0.0.1, then 1.0.0.2, and so on. If you want to publish the same version of your application to multiple locations using Visual Studio, you should switch off this option. However, keep in mind that the automatic update feature springs into action only if it finds a higher version number. The date stamp on the deployed files has no effect (and isn't reliable).

It may seem horribly inelegant to track separate assembly and publication version numbers. However, there are cases where it makes sense. For example, while testing an application you may want to keep the assembly version number fixed without preventing testers from getting the latest version. In this case, you can use the same assembly version number but keep the autoincrementing publish version number. When you're ready to release an official update, you can set the assembly version and the publish version to match. Also, a published application might contain multiple assemblies with different version numbers. In this case, it wouldn't be realistic to use the assembly version number—instead, the ClickOnce infrastructure needs to consider a single version number to determine whether an update is warranted.