Temporary Clickonce Certificates expire after 1 year

Creating and deploying Microsoft Clickonce Applications is a very simple process. However, it’s worth knowing that under the hood quite a lot is taken care for you by the Clickonce deployment wizard.

Once of the most important things to take care of is the Signing certificate. When you first deploy you Clickonce application, the wizard will create a temporary certifacte for signing your application.

What you may not realise at this point is that this certificate will expire in 1 years time. This has the result of rendering your deployed application inert and unable to perform updates.

To find the date of expiry of the Project’s Certificate, open up your project properties, and select the “Signing” tab. From here you’ll see the Certificate’s Details, including it’s expiry date. Here you should also take note of the “Issued To” and "Issued By” fields, you will need them later!

Microsoft of course, expect people to go ahead and buy a certificate from a third party supplier such as Verisign, this usually costs just under £100 or so, and may not be reasonable for small scale deployment. It certainly wouldn’t be if you didn’t realise till some time after the client has settled their invoice!

Microsoft has realised that an expired certificate will cause problems for people, and as such have documented a few workarounds;

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925521

The first option you have is to uninstall your application and reinstall on all your client computers. not so easy if they are a few hundred miles away.

The second option is to extend the the life of your existing certificate using some example code which Microsoft have kindly supplied.

However, this code is somewhat simplistic, mainly in it’s error checking, so kindly some nice folk over at may.be have created a new project solution and some updated code for us to make use of;

http://may.be/renewcert/

Depending on which version of Visual Studio and Dot Net Framework you use, it will most likely be necessary to download the provided Solution, convert it to your version of Visual Studio, and recompile the source.

Once you’ve done this, copy the compiled executable from the \Debug directory to the directory where your solution has created the temporary key file for you. Usually this file is <YourProjectName>_TemporaryKey.pfx, and usually resides in the same directory as your project files. (Where <YourProjectName> is obviously the name of your project!

With the RenewCert.exe file in your project directory, open up a command prompt and cd to your project directory.

Once there, execute the following command;

renewcert MyProject_TemporaryKey.pfx MyProject_FiveYearKey.pfx CN=”MYDOMAIN\MYUSERNAME”

Where you should replace MyProject with the name of your project, and replace “MYDOMAIN\MYUSERNAME” with the information shown in the “Issued By” information I asked you to remember above.

This will create you a nice new Certificate, with a five year expiry. You can then close your command prompt and return to Visual Studio.

From here, you can hit the “Select From File” button in the Signing tab, and load your new certificate. check your expiry date, and it will now have a good five years to run.

All done for the next few years….. Till next time!

Minimise VB.net app to the Notify Area on startup

It’s often desireable to create applications which startup in the Notify Area (or System Tray as it’s sometimes referred to).

The most obvious way to achieve this, one would think, would be to simply set the “Visible” Property of the main form in it’s Load Event. However, as this isn’t possible we have to use a work around.

The simplest method is to set the Visible Property asynchronously using a Delegate…

Public Delegate Sub InvokeByDelegate()

‘
’ Hide Form
’
Private Sub Form1_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, _
ByVal e As  System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load

Me.BeginInvoke(New InvokeByDelegate(AddressOf Me.HideForm)) ‘Invoke the Hide Form Routine Asynchronously

End Sub

‘
’ Hide the Main Form
’
Private Sub HideForm()

Me.Visible = False

End Sub

VB.net - Defaulting a databound ComboBox to show a blank value

 

Once a Combobox is bound to a datasource, we no longer have control over it’s List Collection, so we can’t add a blank item directly to the Combobox’s Collection using the Add Method.

However, we can temporariliy add a row having a blank value in the field bound to the Combobox’s DisplayMemebr property. We can then set the Selected index of the Combobox to that of the new “Blank” row…

dim drwBlankDataRow as DataRow

‘
’ Databind Combobox
’
cmbComboBox.DataSource = dtsDataSet.tblTable
cmbComboBox.ValueMember = “ID_Column”
cmbComboBox.DisplayMember = “Display_Column”

‘
’ Add a blank row to the DataSet
’
drwBlankDataRow = dtsDataSet.tblTable.NewRow
drwBlankDataRow(“Display_Column”) = “”
dtsDataSet.tblTable.AddtblTableRow(drwBlankDataRow)

‘
’ Default the ComboBox to the Blank Row
’
cmbComboBox.SelectedIndex = cmbComboBox.FindStringExact(“”)

The Combobox will now show the new “Blank” row value.

Shared Apache Server Directories require index page in order to access files from the web

For security reasons, Apache hosts enforce that, for a directory and it’s contents to be accessible from the web, the directory must contain an index.htm page.

This can be overridden by adding a .htaccess file with the following lines included;

ErrorDocument 401 "Unauthorized"
DirectoryIndex index.php index.shtml index.html publish.htm publish.html

Using an Apache Server to Host “ClickOnce” .net Deployment

Normally, to deploy ClickOnce applications, you would upload files to a Windows Server hosting environment. However, with the addition of a simple .htaccess file, you can host ClickOnce on an Apache based server.

Simply create a text document with the following content:

ErrorDocument 401 "Unauthorized"
DirectoryIndex index.php index.shtml index.html publish.htm publish.html
AddType application/x-ms-application application
AddType application/x-ms-manifest manifest
AddType application/octet-stream deploy

Save the file as .htaccess and upload to your deployment directoy.

The line:

DirectoryIndex index.php index.shtml index.html publish.htm publish.html

Allows the server to show the standard Visual Studio “publish.htm” file as default.

VB.net : Printer Dialog Box does not appear

Turns out there's an incompatibility with some versions of windows 7 (possibly 64bit versions), which prevent the standard PrintDialog box from appearing when invoked.

This can be worked around by setting the UseEXDialog property to "True".

This forces the dialog into windows XP mode, allowing it to be shown correctly....

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1741302/printdialog-showdialogthis-immediately-returns-dialogresult-cancel-on-windows-7

Annoying eh!