如何在C＃代码中嵌入文件的内容？

Question

Problem

I have a file which contains such text (nothing else)

2010-10-05

I would like to embed this file (content) in the C# code, so I could assign this text to constant (string MyDate), and later use this constant.

Background

What I try to achieve is keeping information about the program in sync -- both on website and within program.

The solution has to be:

• dead simple
• automatic
• smooth

The simplest I thought of, would be keeping file "version" with version (actually release date, because it is more meaningful IMHO), such file can be displayed on website with no problem (PHP). I think I manage writing tiny .bat file to auto-generate such file on each build.

But how to use it (embed) in C# code?

I would like to achieve exactly this, or alternative solution but no more complex than this one.

Workarounds

I already know several workarounds, like:

• creating not only file with just date, but small C# piece of code, which could be directly compiled
• including this file in installer and after installation reading it, to get the version info

But both do not feel "clean" too me. I need something more smooth :-)

Background of the background

My program should notify user "hey, there is newer version of the program" on one hand, on the other hand when browsing website info about release date should be displayed on page.

Facts

• version: date of build which is also release date
• website: Linux, HTML & PHP
• program: VS 2010, C# 4.0, single exe
• installer: Advanced Installer

Edit -- solution

I tried to avoid the problem completely and rely on timestamps of the files -- it could work, because only one weak point would be the case when you build exe before midnight and create installation package after. However, uploading files to ftp server ruins such plan -- you have to make sure ftp server support timestamp modification and you cannot use SFTP protocol.

So, I ended up creating "version" file and not embedding it (because I don't know how) -- I read the content both by PHP script on website and by C# code when executing.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Answer 1

If you use a resource file (.resx files) it can be compiled into the assembly.

MSDN: Adding and Editing Resources (Visual C#)

Answer 2

To solve the issue of checking for updates you could: use a WebClient to load a page from your site, and check the version information.

To solve the issue of displaying version information, you could simply leave a text file called versioninfo.txt in your installer, and load/display that at run time, or as stated by @Daniel you can use a resouce to compile the text file into the binary.

Answer 3

There seems to be two parts to your question:

1) Automatically generate a build number/version for your program

2) Have a web service that will check to see if the build number is the latest version.

For part 1, there are multiple solutions such as automatically including files via resources and pre-build events or even using MS automatically incrementing build numbers.

The second part involves sharing that information with your website. That would have to occur whenever you "publish" your latest version of program and is probably a manual event. You could write a "publishing" program that reads the MS build number or embedded resource of your program and writes that to what ever you will use as the back end store for your web service.

The web service then fields requests from the installed programs and checks to see if a later version exists.

edit

Thinking about it some more. All you need is the MS build number that increments each time you build the program. Think of that as the key to indexing into data kept on your website. The program sends the version number to the web service and if there is a newer version then the web service returns the newer version number plus its publication date.

However you may still want to embed a publication date in your program in order to display it in an about box without the need to go to the web service to find that information.