Visual Studio ClickOnce deployment - certificate expiration

Question

I have a problem with a Clickonce deplyment of a Winforms app. When i built the new setup, and tried to export it overwriting as usual the previous setup, Visual Studio came up stating that my certificate is expired.

This behaviour is described here and there is a workaround here. But these solutions are not applicable in my situation.

Another workaround involves taking back the system date of the deployment server to a date before the certicate expiry date (during the deployment operations) - but I see this as a very "last chance".

Any hint from the community? Do you know any other workaround I can try?

Thanks

Andrea

Answer 1

I don't understand why RenewCert isn't applicable to you. Can you explain why those won't work?

Answer 2

well... the problem with RenewCert is that the certicate's password is gone together with an external consultant that left months ago, and we cannot get back in touch with him.

not a technical problem, as you can see... :-(

Answer 3

I ran into this problem almost two years ago. There is really no good workaround if RenewCert won't work for you. I even emailed the ClickOnce authority, Brian Noyes, and got confirmation that there were no good workarounds.

We ended up buying a 3 year cert and telling our users to uninstall. However, if I remember correctly, the users only got error messages when launching the app from the start menu. If they went to the web page, it installed the app and ran fine. Of course the client then had 2 versions of the app on their machines :). I can't remember what happened to the start menu shortcuts in that scenario.

Answer 4

I found a blog entry here by James Harte that describes a method to have your application remove itself and launch the new clickonce install. It worked for me.