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ClickOnce signing certificate expiry

Well, I created a "Security Certificate" a year ago because the "ClickOnce Manifests" stated complaining about my not having one. It turns out that this thing only works for a year and I now can't publish my applications anymore.
I could simply make a new certificate, but presumably this will only put the problem off for another year.

Is there some page that explains the hows, whys and wherefores of ClickOnce signing certificates?
I've found this page , which may or may not even be relevant, but is something about how to make some kind of certificate of some kind.

I've found some pages claiming that in VS2008, I don't even need to use these things; but if I don't use them, everything starts complaining.

I can find buttons in the VS2008 interface to create and "install" certificates, but not to configure or paramterise them; I can find out that they're "a digitally-signed statement that binds the value of a public key to the identity of the person, device, or service that holds the corresponding private key", but I can't find out what that means, nor why I'm supposed to have one inside my projects, how I'm supposed to make it, what it's supposed to say , what I'm supposed to do with it or anything that I would call useful or relevant data about why the silly things appear to be a required element of my ClickOnce projects.

Anyone got any advice?

Moved byMartin Xie - MSFTMSFTFriday, September 18, 2009 4:01 AMMove it to ClickOnce Deployment forum for better support. (From:Visual Basic General)

KFrostILEM Thursday, September 17, 2009 8:10 AM

If your application targets the .Net 3.5 Framework (SP-1), and you are doing automatic updates, you can simply replace the certificate with a new one and redeploy it. It will work fine.

If your application targets .Net 2.0 or .Net 3.0, or you are doing programmatic updates, or your application is a VSTO application targeting .Net 3.5 SP-1, your users will have to uninstall the application and reinstall it. You can do this programmatically for them. Here's a link to an article explaining the whys and wherefores and the code.

I just found out about the VSTO instance, so that's not mentioned in the article, but it IS a problem.

If you are using a test certificate, and you are targeting .Net 2.0 or .Net 3.0, you CAN make a copy of the certificate and extend the expiration date. (You can also do this if you have a purchased certificate from a source such as Verisign, but it will show up as "unknown publisher".) This is also explained in the article.

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

RobinDotNet

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