Displaying the build date

Question

I currently have an app displaying the build number in its title window. That\'s well and good except it means nothing to most of the users, who want to know if they have t

Answer 1

In 2018 some of the above solutions do not work anymore or do not work with .NET Core.

I use the following approach which is simple and works for my .NET Core 2.0 project.

Add the following to your .csproj inside the PropertyGroup :

    $([System.DateTime]::Now)

This defines a PropertyFunction which you can access in your pre build command.

Your pre-build looks like this

echo $(today) > $(ProjectDir)BuildTimeStamp.txt

Set the property of the BuildTimeStamp.txt to Embedded resource.

Now you can read the time stamp like this

public static class BuildTimeStamp
    {
        public static string GetTimestamp()
        {
            var assembly = Assembly.GetEntryAssembly(); 

            var stream = assembly.GetManifestResourceStream("NamespaceGoesHere.BuildTimeStamp.txt");

            using (var reader = new StreamReader(stream))
            {
                return reader.ReadToEnd();
            }
        }
    }