Make dotnet pack usage more CI / build system friendly

Steps to reproduce

Assume, that have a project.json with a version placeholder (e.g. 1.0.0). It would be nice, if there would be a way for a CI system (like TeamCity) to update this version number without requiring the usage of regular expressions.

Expected behavior

One or more of the following:

• Support for $version$ as version value.
• Support for --version parameter

The $version$ would get replaced by the version of the AssemblyInformationalVersionAttribute or (when the former is missing), the value of the AssemblyVersionAttribute. The --version parameter would enforce the usage of the given version (and thus overriding the found assembly version).

Actual behavior

dotnet pack uses the version from the project.json and the CI system (like TeamCity) must patch the project.json, which is error prone, because it must not update the version values of dependencies.

Environment data

dotnet --info output:

.NET Command Line Tools (1.0.0-rc2-002485)

Product Information:
 Version:     1.0.0-rc2-002485
 Commit Sha:  d3c65aee87

Runtime Environment:
 OS Name:     Windows
 OS Version:  10.0.10586
 OS Platform: Windows
 RID:         win10-x64

[yishaigalatzer]

There is no point in investing in dotnet pack. We are retiring it right after rc in favor of nuget pack

[dasMulli]

@ardalis You could introduce an msbuild property for your build number as such:

  <PropertyGroup>
    <BuildNumber Condition=" '$(BuildNumber)' == '' ">0</BuildNumber>
    <Version>1.2.$(BuildNumber)</Version>
  </PropertyGroup>

$ dotnet pack /p:BuildNumber=34
Microsoft (R) Build Engine version 15.1.548.43366
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

  foo -> /Users/martin/foo/bin/Debug/netstandard1.4/foo.dll
  Successfully created package '/Users/martin/foo/bin/Debug/foo.1.2.34.nupkg'.