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A Semantic Version Provider

Published on Wednesday, July 23, 2014 6:00:00 PM UTC in Programming & Tools

I did some thinking recently on how team collaboration with different versioning strategies of components should look like, ideally, to cause as little friction as possible. Particularly, the use of technologies like NuGet to distribute components, and ways to integrate this with continuous builds, made it necessary to re-consider some details I had taken as a given before.

During a proof-of-concept phase for some workflow ideas I came to the conclusion that it would be necessary to have some sort of service that can provide version numbers on a "global" level (e.g. accessible to everyone, not only to your build system, but also individual developers). Naturally, I wanted it to follow a semantic versioning approach, something I've grown a fan of during the last years.

What started as a quick implementation of a sample service has now turned into a complete library for semantic version generation that can be used in arbitrary .NET projects. It's fully backed by unit and integration tests and should be production-ready (your mileage may vary). You can find it on GitHub. The repository also contains a Web API wrapper that exposes its features as a web service, with support for arbitrary numbers of projects, components and the like to version, through configuration.

Tags: Build Process · NuGet · SemVer