Visual Studio ClickOnce deployment - certificate expiration - visual-studio-2005

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?

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.

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.

Related

Strange Clickonce signing behaviour

So I built an Outlook VSTO Add-in, and in visual studio on the signing page selected a valid certificate which was bought from a Cert Authority. When I publish the add-in, it all works fine and the installer is trusted.
Here's where it gets weird - When I zipped and emailed it to a colleague they found that the application had an unknown publisher. So I downloaded it from the email I sent them on my pc (the one I built the app with) and sure enough the certificate seemed to be untrusted. Zipping and unzipping the files that I already had locally worked fine and the app was trusted, but the exact same file taken from my email is untrusted.
I'm completely baffled, don't even know how to start googling this issue - anyone got any ideas?
Figured out the answer for anyone else that runs into this problem.
The hash used by VS when creating a clickonce application is SHA1 (yes, even with VS2019), but SHA1 was depreciated by MS in 2017, meaning anything signed using it is not trusted by later versions of office. Thus you have to publish an unsigned clickonce application with Visual Studio, and then use the "Developer Command Prompt for VS" to sign the .exe with the cert using SHA265.

Login to Titanium Studio

A little over a year ago, I shelved several projects and went on to do other work. Now I'm finding that I cannot login to my installation of Titanium Studio. I clicked the 'troubleshooting login' link and it pointed me to the Appcelerator page for "Errors Logging In to Studio". There it suggested that I try the following command:
curl -F "username=XXXX" -F "password=YYYY" https://dashboard.appcelerator.com/api/v1/auth/login
When I did so, with my email address (which contains a '-'), it returned:
"Username must be a valid email address." Of course it is a valid email address, and Titanium confirmed it years ago. It is also the same email address I used to access the Appcelerator website.
I changed my email address to one that doesn't include the '-'. Same result.
Has Appcelerator completely locked us out of Titanium Studio?
Any suggestions regarding how to get past this hurdle would be greatly appreciated!! (When I last used Appcelerator Studio, it didn't feel comfortable, so I went back to Titanium. I'm really hoping that I don't have to start over on my apps.)
Thank you in advance!
Rob
Appcelerator discontinued Titanium studio and replaced with Appcelerator Studio with the integrated enterprise features - Arrow, performance and test services, etc for easy development of mobile applications.
You can't use titanium studio login credentials with Appcelerator Studio. However, you can get a free trial access http://www.appcelerator.com/signup/ and get started with Appcelerator Studio.
You can import all your old projects to Appcelerator studio and I don't think you need to put extra effort to start working on this.
Titanium studio was discontinued a while ago, easily over a year now. You do need to use appcelerator studio or your favorite editor if you don't like studio. You can compile and run from the command line.
Also verify your account on their website. It seems they have recently changed some things. Eg. my "forever trial" (which should have been a perpetual Indie, but that's another discussion) seems to be expired recently. So maybe you have to take some additional administrative steps in order to be able to continue working with your apps.

Error when trying to renew Visual Studio Community Edition license

I'm using Microsoft Visual Studio Community Edition 2013. My trial ran out recently and I'm trying to renew it by logging in. A window pane comes up for me to sign in and I enter my credentials, however I get the following script error:
Line: 4
Char: 16405
Error: Object doesn't support this property or method
Code: 0
URL: https://app.vssps.visualstudio.com/_static/tfs/20150123T002517/_scripts/TFS/Loader.min.js
After some rudimentary searching, it seems as if I'm missing a library. Has anyone experienced the same problem and knows which part of the code it's referring to? I don't want to go on a mad updating rampage.
I have been running into this problem for months. I do development on Virtual Box machines running XP, because it is small and easy to copy, and I have gotten this problem on some of the machines and not others. I thought it had to do with window updates, but I have that turned off, and I am still getting the problem on machines that just worked a few days ago. Unfortunately with XP you can't update anything or even go back to a previous version of IE.
Actually, it was the virtualization software itself. I'm actually using vmware not virtualbox (mix-up in the comments). Incidentally, vmware just released an update today and after installing it, I was able to log in.
By the way, it could've been the log-in itself. After the update, microsoft visual studio didn't even ask me to validate the software, but went straight to the ide. I saw by my user id, an exclamation prompting me to sign in, whereupon I was able to validate my install.

Do I have to sign my ClickOnce manifest?

I have a VS2012 solution (WinForm vb.net) which I deploy thanks to ClickOnce. I do some tests today for deploying this application. I'm able to publish and deploy this application without signing the ClickOnce manifest nor signing the assembly. On the Signing tab of my project I uncheck 'Sign the ClickOnce manifests' and 'Sign the assembly'. I don't have any errors (about assembly not signed) when installing this application.
I copy the published folder on a USB key and install it on another computer without problem. I'm also able to update my application and install these updates automatically (thanks to ClickOnce).
I read a lot about ClickOnce and signing and it seems I don't have to sign for WinForm application.
Does someone can confirm this? I wonder if I copy my ClickOnce folder on a share on the network company if I can always install it without problems?
Tomorrow I will have the opportunity to try to install on the company's network (not today).
Thanks for your help.
Signing ClickOnce manifests is optional since .Net 3.5. See here for confirmation from Microsoft: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/zfz60ccf.aspx

VSTO solution using ClickOnce via IIS 6 fails to download manifest

I have an Office solution for Word 2007 that I publish using ClickOnce. When I publish it to a local directory, I can install the .vsto file and everything works. When I publish it to our web server, though, I cannot install it. The error I get is:
Downloading file:///C:/DOCUME~1/Dave/LOCALS~1/Temp/Application Files/MyApp_1_0_0_0/MyApp.dll.manifest did not succeed.
I have been Googling for most of the day, and have already tried the following:
Added the correct MIME types to IIS 6 config (as described here and here on MSDN).
Created a test certificate, imported it into my trusted root authorities, and signed the app with it.
Published the solution to a network share and tried installing from there. It worked fine.
Tried accessing the MyApp.dll.manifest file directly from the web URL. The browser is able to find the file just fine.
What am I missing? Thanks.
Make sure that Windows Installer 3.1 is installed on the end-users PC. If it's not, you may want to add it as a prerequisite to your application.
Also, you may want to check and see if the application is installed from the Windows Add/Remove Programs screen. If it is in the list, you may need to uninstall the application, first. I know, you're probably thinking 'But the application hasn't been installed yet.'
Quite a few application that are published via ClickOnce. ClickOnce works great most of the time, but every now and then I see users who run into hiccups similar to yours when they try to initially install the application. The best solution is to usually uninstall all prerequisites, reboot, manually re-install the prerequisites (not from the ClickOnce setup.exe file) and then launch the application.
Some of those steps may not be necessary but it tends to fix the problem nearly every single time.

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