I have a question about the Application.ProductVersion difference from .Net4.5 to .Net 4.8

Question

I recently upgraded my Visual Basic application from using .Net 4.5 to .Net4.8 and when I build my smart assembly .exe and run it, it will show the Application.ProductVersion on my main page in the application as some weird "1.22.0+ and a Guid" instead of my applications actual version number like it did using .Net4.5. I'm currently using Smart Assembly v7.5. When I run in the debug or release mode in visual studio 2019 it shows correctly. Any ideas as to what is happening? Am I missing a reference somewhere?

Answer 1

Firstly .NET 4.8 is not a minor upgrade from .NET 4.5. .NET 4.8 is actually .NET Core 4.8 so you have entirely changed runtimes and this generally means a lot of things are different. Versioning in .NET Core is handled via attributes in your project file (or from the build server) whereas .NET 4.5 used the AssemblyInfo.vb file. That file is no longer needed in most cases.

The general recommendation is to move your versioning, company, product, etc to the project file as discussed here. These can be set in the Packaging tab of the project as well.

If you want to keep using the AssemblyInfo file then you need to manually modify your project file to not auto-generate this file anymore. The above docs tell you how to do that.