Automating ClickOnce deployment with security (cer

Question

I just read Configuring ClickOnce Trusted Publishers and got it running at another computer on network. I deployed the application on network itself (that is, \\\abc\something).

Though I could not find certmgr.exe as part of Windows core component, as the article says (..so you will need to use the certificate management console (certmgr.exe) included in Windows..), I instead found it at "C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\bin". It worked fine, but did I miss something? I mean, what if the user did not have Visual Studio installed?

Now, I had to explicitly go and get this thing done (that is, importing the certificate using certmgr.exe) on the user/client's computer on the network. Is there a way to automate it? Where I do nothing explicitly and when the user clicks setup.exe in the deployed application on the network (\\\abc\something), he/she can install the same without getting security-based prompts.

I checked out BOOTSTRAP, but I could not exactly understand how to use it, HERE? I thought of pasting the certificate at its appropriate location (thought that importing the certificate using certmgr.exe pastes it somewhere on the disk? In some "personal" directory)?

In gist, I want to automate the process where user can install the application from network (\\\abc\something) without security/trust prompts. And I as a developer need not explicitly import the certificate in his/her/user/client's computer.

Answer 1

CERTMGR is an MMC snapin, not an EXE

No, these are in fact two (slightly) different tools.

On Windows 7 Professional, certmgr.msc is installed by default into System32. It is a pure GUI MMC and cannot be scripted.

certmgr.exe can be used on the command line and is provided with the Windows 7 SDK which must be downloaded and installed separately. But I suppose the .exe would work on any Windows 7 machine, even without the other SDK tools installed.

Answer 2

CERTMGR is an MMC snapin, not an EXE. Run it as CERTMGR.MSC.

Alternatively, you can use CERTUTIL.EXE from the command line, which is available in C:\Windows\System32 on recent versions of Windows.