Silviu-Marius Ardelean's Blog

Manually editing of binary files version in the resource editor of Visual Studio IDE is not a viable solution. If we have dozens of projects in our solution, then for each kit building we should need manual resources file edit. Otherwise, we can use a special tool that does this thing for us.
Unfortunately this approach is not the most flexible and could fail.

For our flexible binaries properties changes and in order to avoid manual edit for each rebuild we can create and include a header file (version.h) that contains some constants of product version and file version of our project (.rc files).

We have to include only these constants into this file (version.h):

    #define PRODUCT_VERSION      4.3.2.198
    #define PRODUCT_VERSION_STR  "4.3.2.198"

Then, for each .rc file wherever we have FileVersion and ProductVersion we have to use this constants.
When we will build a new kit, we have to change only these constants and then to start the kit building process. Everything is fine until we add new controls in our projects resource files. Then, because of Visual Studio IDE automation we can get an unlikely surprise: the FileVersion and the ProductVersion properties could be reset to 1.0.0.0.

In order to avoid this issue and edit the version only in a single place I propose the following workaround:

// Neutral resources
#if !defined(AFX_RESOURCE_DLL) || defined(AFX_TARG_NEU)
#ifdef _WIN32
LANGUAGE LANG_NEUTRAL, SUBLANG_NEUTRAL
#pragma code_page(1252)
#endif //_WIN32

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
//
// Version
//

#include "..\version.h"

VS_VERSION_INFO VERSIONINFO
 FILEVERSION PRODUCT_VERSION
 PRODUCTVERSION PRODUCT_VERSION
 FILEFLAGSMASK 0x3fL
#ifdef _DEBUG
 FILEFLAGS 0x1L
#else
 FILEFLAGS 0x0L
#endif
 FILEOS 0x4L
 FILETYPE 0x1L
 FILESUBTYPE 0x0L
BEGIN
    BLOCK "StringFileInfo"
    BEGIN
        BLOCK "040904e4"
        BEGIN
            VALUE "CompanyName", "TODO: <Company name>"
            VALUE "FileDescription", "TODO: <File description>"
            VALUE "FileVersion", PRODUCT_VERSION_STR
            VALUE "InternalName", "testResources.exe"
            VALUE "LegalCopyright", "TODO: (c) <Company name>.  All rights reserved."
            VALUE "OriginalFilename", "your_project.exe"
            VALUE "ProductName", "TODO: <Product name>"
            VALUE "ProductVersion", PRODUCT_VERSION_STR
        END
    END
    BLOCK "VarFileInfo"
    BEGIN
        VALUE "Translation", 0x409, 1252
    END
END
#endif    // Neutral resources
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

   "\r\n"
   "#include ""res\\your_project.rc2""\r\n"
   "\0"

That code block looks like this:

3 TEXTINCLUDE
BEGIN
    "\r\n"
    "#include ""res\\your_project.rc2""\r\n"
    "\0"
    "#define _AFX_NO_SPLITTER_RESOURCES\r\n"
    "#define _AFX_NO_OLE_RESOURCES\r\n"
    "#define _AFX_NO_TRACKER_RESOURCES\r\n"
    "#define _AFX_NO_PROPERTY_RESOURCES\r\n"
    "\r\n"
    "#if !defined(AFX_RESOURCE_DLL) || defined(AFX_TARG_ENU)\r\n"
    "LANGUAGE 9, 1\r\n"
    "#pragma code_page(1252)\r\n"
    "#include ""res\\your_project.rc2""  // non-Microsoft Visual C++ edited resources\r\n"
    "#include ""afxres.rc""     // Standard components\r\n"
    "#endif\r\n"
    "\0"
END

Don’t forget to edit .rc2 file name with the right file name of your project.

#include "res\your_project.rc2"

The rest of the section’s lines have to be deleted.

Observations
Once you apply these steps, the product version properties will not possible from the Visual Studio IDE resource editor, anymore (only as edit text file or an external text editor). If we didn’t define something special in our project’s String Table we will see only IDS_ABOUTBOX.