File versions

When discussing how to version long running orchestrations or other BizTalk/.NET assemblies, we mentioned that you can version the .NET assembly version to load the old and new assemblies side by side. However, we also need a means of tracking version changes when making tweaks to existing components, whose assemblies we want to overwrite rather than deploy side by side with a new .NET assembly version. This is especially important when you have a BizTalk application deployed to an environment, have made changes to the source code in Visual Studio, but aren't sure whether your changes have been deployed to the environment or not.

If the .NET assembly version isn't being incremented, then the next best means of versioning your assemblies is through the use of the File version field:

If you deploy an assembly for which you've incremented the file version number, you will not notice any difference in the BizTalk Administration Console, Also, if you use the GACUTIL tool with the...