Visual Studio ClickOnce deployment - certificate e

Question

I have a problem with a ClickOnce deployment of a Windows Forms application. 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 in You receive an error message when you try to update a Visual Studio 2005 ClickOnce application after the certificate that was used to sign the installation expires and there is a workaround in RenewCert - Working Version. 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 certificate expiry date (during the deployment operations) - but I see this as a very "last chance".

How can I fix this problem? Is there another workaround I can try?

Answer 1

I found a blog entry, ClickOnce and Expiring Code Signing Certificates by James Harte, that describes a method to have your application remove itself and launch the new ClickOnce install. It worked for me.

Answer 2

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.