The Dog Tags of Software.

When I was glancing the Jensen Harris Blog on maintaining version history in Microsoft for Softwares. I was really amused on the way they maintain the build number in the version name space. I checked my version of MS Office in its About Dialog box, which showed something like this 2003(11.5305.8107). In this '11' means 'Office 2003' is the 11th Version of MS Office and 5305 represent the Build number. The first two digits '53' is number of months from January 2000. (Jan 2000 is when Office 2003 development was started). The next two digits '05' represents the day of the month when it was built.i.e, my Office Pack was built on 5th June 2004. That was quite interesting, in deciphering a small piece of information.

But these kind of Dog tags are required in our software industry on every piece of code we do for maintainability. This is what we are struggling to do in our project where I am slogging.

Hope these kind of good name space is used in maintaining version history in our project too...though I don't have a control on it :)