How do you handle versioning on a Web Application?

Question

What are the strategies for versioning of a web application/ website?

I notice that here in the Beta there is an svn revision number in the footer and that's ideal for an application that uses svn over one repository. But what if you use externals or a different source control application that versions separate files?

It seems easy for a Desktop app, but I can't seem to find a suitable way of versioning for an asp.net web application.

NB I'm not sure that I have been totally clear with my question.

1. What I want to know is how to build and auto increment a version number for an asp.net application.
2. I'm not interested in how to link it with svn.

Answer 1

I think what you are looking for is something like this: How to auto-increment assembly version using a custom MSBuild task. It's a little old but I think it will work.

Answer 2

For my big apps I just use a incrementing version number id (1.0, 1.1, ...) that i store in a comment of the main file (usually index.php).
For just websites I usually just have a revision number (1,2,3,...).

Answer 3

I have a tendency to stick with basic integers at first (1,2,3), moving onto rational numbers (2.1, 3.13) when things get bigger...

Tried using fruit at one point, that works well for a small office. Oh, the 'banana' release? looks over in the corner "yeah... that's getting pretty old now..."

Unfortunately, confusion started to set in when the development team grew, is it an Orange, or Mandarin, or Tangelo? It looks ok. What do you mean "rotten on the inside?"

... but in all honesty. Setup a separate repository as a master, development goes on in various repositories. For every scheduled release everything is checked into the master repository so that you can quickly roll back when something goes wrong. (I'm assuming dev/test/production are all separate servers, and dev is never allowed to touch production or the master repository....)