Assembly Information
Assembly attributes are the properties of an assembly that gives
information such as company name, product, copyright, version, culture and
other information about an assembly. To learn about an assembly, right click on
an executable, select Properties menu item and then select Details tab, you
will see information about file type, version, product name and version,
company information and so on as you can see in Figure 3.
Figure 3
When you create a Windows Forms application using Visual Studio
2010, this information is automatically created for you. But this is not a
secret. You can change this information in your application in AssemblyInfo.cs
class.
If you open your project in Visual Studio 2010 and view project
files on Solution Explorer, you will not see AssemblyInfo.cs class. To find
this file, you need to click on Show All
Files icon in Solution Explorer as you can see in Figure 4.
Figure 4
You may change an assembly information by changing assembly
attributes in AssemblyInfo.cs class. If you double click on AssemblyInfo.cs
class, you will see something like Figure 5 where you can see you can change
value of title, description, company, product, copyright and other culture
information.
Figure 5
This information can be accessed in code by using the Application
class properties. The C# code snippet in Listing 5 displays CompanyName,
ProductName, and ProductVersion properties of an application in a ListBox
control.
listBox1.Items.Add("CompanyName: " + Application.CompanyName);
listBox1.Items.Add("CommonAppDataRegistry: " + Application.ProductName);
listBox1.Items.Add("ExecutablePath: " + Application.ProductVersion);
Listing 5
The output of Listing 5 looks like Figure 6.
Figure 6
Listing 6 is
the VB.NET version of Listing 5.
listBox1.Items.Add("CompanyName: " + Application.CompanyName)
listBox1.Items.Add("CommonAppDataRegistry: " + Application.ProductName)
listBox1.Items.Add("ExecutablePath: " + Application.ProductVersion)
Listing 6
Stay tuned until next article!