[Question] How to automatically fill android version info from AssemblyVersion

[janseris]

Description

Hi,
Google Play and Android overall in order to correctly detect newer versions of applications, uses <ApplicationVersion> tagin .csproj which accepts an integer value (e.g. 5).
The standard for C#/.NET projects regarding versioning is which is Assembly Version (e.g. 1.2.3 or 1.2.3.4)
Then Android uses <ApplicationDisplayVersion> to display application version "name" to the users (e.g. "1.2.3")
How to please automatically synchronize these two from standard ?For example, is required to be unique for every Android app Google Play store release.
Or at least how to synchronize assembly version (<Version>) with <ApplicationDisplayVersion> which uses the same value?

Thank you

[Ghostbird]

We never managed to do that either, so we chose a different approach. For the ApplicationDisplayVersion we use a semver string built from the git tag + commit count

For the ApplicationVersion we simply use the unix timestamp.

This can be done in the csproj file like this. Note that it has a dependency on perl in the PATH.

Also note that this does not prevent display name version conflicts from arising between branches.

<Project Sdk="Microsoft.NET.Sdk" InitialTargets="Set application display version; Set versions">
  <Target Name="Set application display version" Condition="'$(ApplicationDisplayVersion)' == '1.0.0'">
    <PropertyGroup>
      <Redirect Condition="Exists('/dev/null')">/dev/null</Redirect>
      <Redirect Condition="'$(Redirect)' == ''">NUL</Redirect>
    </PropertyGroup>
    <Exec Command="git describe --tags | perl -pe &quot;s/^v([0-9]+)(?:[.-]([0-9]+))?(?:[.-]([0-9]+))?(?:[.-]([0-9]+))?.*$/\1.\2.\3.\4/; s/\.+$//;&quot; 2&gt; $(Redirect)" ConsoleToMsBuild="True">
      <Output TaskParameter="ConsoleOutput" PropertyName="ApplicationDisplayVersion" />
    </Exec>
  </Target>
  <Target Name="Set versions" Condition="'$(ApplicationVersion)' == '1' AND '$(Configuration)' != 'Debug'">
    <Exec Command="date +%s" ConsoleToMsBuild="True">
      <Output TaskParameter="ConsoleOutput" PropertyName="ApplicationVersion" />
    </Exec>
  </Target>
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