I took another look at the FileVersion sample. I wish the API was actually a little different. The API actually makes sense as a general use API, but it isn't as user-friendly as I would like. I wish that there were an instance method on the Assembly class called "GetFileVersion" or something like that it took nothing and returned a Version class.

Here is more of less what it would look like, except that the GetFileVersion wouldn't be static, it wouldn't take anything and would be on the assembly class.

If you look @ the FileVersion class, there is a lot of stuff on there, and it is a super wonky API anyway. I don't understand why it has a single static method that more or less acts that the instance constructor. Why not just have a constructor that takes a string or a FileInfo or even a FileStream. Bad API design. I prefer the Version class a lot more since it is super simple. I

using System;
using System.Reflection;
using System.Diagnostics;
namespace FileVersion
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Assembly asm;
            Version ver;

            asm = Assembly.Load("mscorlib, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089");
            ver = GetFileVersion(asm);
            Console.WriteLine(ver.ToString());
        }

        static Version GetFileVersion(Assembly asm)
        {
            FileVersionInfo versionInfo;
            Version ver;

            versionInfo = FileVersionInfo.GetVersionInfo(asm.Location);
            ver = new Version(versionInfo.FileMajorPart, versionInfo.FileMinorPart, versionInfo.FileBuildPart, versionInfo.FilePrivatePart);

            return ver;
        }
    }
}

If you look @ the FileVersion class, there is a lot of stuff on there, and it is a super wonky API anyway. I don't understand why it has a single static method that more or less acts like an instance constructor. Why not just have a constructor that takes a string or a FileInfo or even a FileStream. Bad API design. I prefer the above method (for the assembly case) that returns the Version class since it is super simple. I realize that the native file version is a string, so can contain more stuff, but the 4-part version number is really all I want.