I’ve been doing some msbuild (NAnt clone from Microsoft) scripting recently. Because msbuild does not even ship with the most basic tasks (zip anybody?) I soon came to the point where I needed to update assembly info files and didn’t know how. A search brought up this post.

One of our most frequently asked questions is: “How do update my assembly version numbers at build time?”. Unfortunately our answer has been “you can’t”. Until today, that is.

They provided a c# script which is even distributed under the Microsoft Community License, uhuuu!

It has its bugs, but as mentioned in the post it was written by a manager so you knew it from the beginning. In the end I wrote it at my own. Anyway, at least a manager who writes some code from time to time, sympathetic!

Not very extraordinary until now, isn’t it?

If you look down the comments though, you see following:

I’m very proud of Visual Studio Team System and what Microsoft have done here - I’ve blogged about it

Hu? sounds like an Apple fanboy on engadget.

After I found out who’s blog it is I read a few posts. Of course he agrees with everything what Microsoft is doing and planing and even uses live search:

Ah come on Microsoft! That msdn-blog-cross-praising may impress a reader when he skims through the comments, but I assume the majority will debunk it as cheap marketing. It is a bit, mhh… embarrassing for such a company.
Especially because it’s a simple script with a few hundred lines of simple c# code, not something to be “very proud of”

Lame blog marketing…

Tags: microsoft, msbuild