>>At the place where I worked my former colleague and a genious build a solution to automatically increment these versions and merge dlls into one big dll.
>>
>>But it was before I came and I'm not sure I understood how he did it.
>
>I really do not like the ability to merge DLL together. But, I do understand some of its use. For now, I am ok with the process. The next step would be to gather this information by code so I can adjust a field in our table with the current version number of the application.

Do we have reflection in VB.NET? I think I read that we do, but I don't recall. If you can get "Professional C# 2005 with .NET 3.0" book, there is a chapter 12 there on this topic.