Teambuild / MSBuild and stamping QA-approved builds

We have an automated build and QA process for our software, using tfs/teambuild and msbuild, and we want to be able to know (for audit purposes) whether a component has gone through that process or not.

For example, if a library is installed on a user's machine, I'd like to be able to inspect it in some way to tell that it went through the build. In particular, I want to be able to distinguish it from components built directly on a developer's machine, and then manually installed.

What is the b开发者_Go百科est way to do this? Code signing as part of the build process seems closest to these requirements, but presumably this would not cover any 3rd-party libraries that might be used? I also read about the ILMerge tool to merge all assemblies into one, but then I don't know enough to work out whether they can then be signed or not?

I'm sure we're not the first people to have the requirement, so casting around for any ideas or hints from others who might have done such a thing

Thanks!

Our developer builds are set to keep the versions at "0.0.0.0", but our build server marks the build based on a pre-configured version and automagically generated build string. "1.0.3.xxx". Your build server doesn't allow for this?

Your build process should be updating each of your projects assemblyinfo.cs files (or a global linked equivalent), you can do this with the TFS changeset number, so like the previous poster indicated you end up with the property on each dll of 1.0.changeset.buildno or something similar. You can do this easily in msbuild. You could have the values of each assembly info file set in source control to be something obvious like 0 or 999.

A lot of what your asking is about process and training as well though. If your using installers or zips to package your deliverables then you can also label them with the build number as part of your build process. But if you have changeset you have the link from dll to code, so traceable, coupled with links to third party dll references as defined in each csproj.