I have inherited a project that uses clickonce deployment. It is a purely internal application accessed by a limited user base with restricted access. I note that there is a Certificate in the deployment package.

Is this always necessary?

I am concerned that this will become an issue you the IT Operations group, because i assume that this certificate will need to be periodically re-newed, and this appears to require that the project is updated (by the development team) and re-deployed. In the clients that i typcally work for they are tight on governance and this will require change management with non-trivial cost.

Is this an issue for other people?

Have i miss-understood something?

regards

Paul

I believe that it was created within VS - it has the original developers name in it!

Paul

When the certificate expires, the users will still be able to install the application.

If you are targeting .NET 3.5 and doing automatic updates, you can simply create a new certificate and deploy.

In most other conditions, you will have to extend your certificate. If you were using a purchased certificate and not targeting .NET 3.5 and doing automatic updates, your customers would have to uninstall and reinstall the application.

Here is a blog entry on this (I'm going to be updating this soon; I have a new version that includes .NET 4.0):

http://robindotnet.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/clickonce-and-expiring-certificates/

RobinDotNet

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Microsoft MVP

Hi Paul,

The certificate is used to sign the ClickOnce manifest, when you publish a ClickOnce application; you need to use a certificate to sign its manifest. If you don’t have one, VS will generate a temporary one for you. Please try Robin’s suggestion and tell us if you have any further question.

Hope this helps you.

Sincerely,
Kira Qian
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