A very common scenario while performing TFS builds is to increment version number of the assemblies. There are quite a few approaches of which I would like to share two links:

Ewald Hofman’s Approach: http://www.ewaldhofman.nl/post/2010/05/13/Customize-Team-Build-2010-e28093-Part-5-Increase-AssemblyVersion.aspx#id_02e7b082-ce95-49a9-92e9-7dc88887b377

Richard Bank’s Approach : http://www.richard-banks.org/2010/07/how-to-versioning-builds-with-tfs-2010.html

Both these approaches work well, however there are scenarios where Editing and Checking–in the Assembly version information can create problems with Build Definitions meant for Continuous Integration, or gated Check-ins. You can suppress the Continuous Integration Builds while checking in the Assembly info file by just putting a comment “***NO_CI***” as specified by Ewald in his blog.

However, if you have Gated Checkin in place, this can turn out to be difficult to suppress, I myself tried to suppress the Build Trigger during the check in process but things doesn’t turn out well. That’s where Richard’s solution comes as handy.

Both the solutions have their own pros and cons, which I believe can only be experienced over a period of time. In case of Richard’s solution I believe that we don’t have any history of the Assembly Version Info file and when you take latest of the solution the information will be lost.

If you notice closely, that suppressing the Continuous Integration (the NO_CI approach in check in comments) is a workaround provided by Microsoft, however I didn’t find anything to suppress the gated Checkin so far. Suggestions or Findings are most welcome.