I've been using ProjectBuildCounter for doing auto-incrementing build numbers in Visual Studio.

It's pretty easy to use right out of the box and it has lots of configuration options.

Basically, you just add a Pre-build or Post-build[^1] event that calls the ProjectBuildCounter.exe on the command-line and give it your project's AssemblyInfo.cs as an argument

c:\bin\ProjectBuildCounter.exe "$(ProjectDir)Properties\AssemblyInfo.cs"

The only issue I had was it would increment the build number every time I did a Debug build when I'd really only like it to increment the build number when I do a Release build.

Turns out, that's pretty easy to.

Visual Studio build events have lots of different substitution macros (like $(ProjectDir)) and even some basic conditional logic.

So, to have the build number increment only when building from the Release configuration, you just have this:

if $(ConfigurationName) == Release (
  c:\bin\ProjectBuildCounter.exe "$(ProjectDir)Properties\AssemblyInfo.cs"
)

[^1]: Build events can be accessed by clicking on the PROJECT menu, then clicking Project Properties, then clicking Build Events