Skip to main content

Import a .pfx file at build time

For our desktop applications (WPF and even Winforms), we are still using ClickOnce. Although the technology is rather old, it still serves our needs.

An important part to securely deploy our applications through ClickOnce is signing the application and the deployment manifest using a public/private key pair. During local development, you can use a PFX file and select it on the Signing tab for your project.

If you build the project for the first time and you didn’t provide the PFX password yet, you get an error like this:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\BuildTools\MSBuild\Current\Bin\Microsoft.Common.CurrentVersion.targets(3476,5): Error MSB3326: Cannot import the following key file: . The key file may be password protected. To correct this, try to import the certificate again or import the certificate manually into the current user’s personal certificate store.

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\BuildTools\MSBuild\Current\Bin\Microsoft.Common.CurrentVersion.targets(3476,5): Error MSB3321: Importing key file "2023.pfx" was canceled.

However on the build server, this manual action is of course not a good solution.

Import the .pfx file on the build server

First we need to check in our pfx file into source control. Once that is done, also add the import-pfx Powershell script to source control:

Now we are good to go and can update our build script. We create a new Powershell task and invoke our script before building the ClickOnce application:

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

.NET 8–Keyed/Named Services

A feature that a lot of IoC container libraries support but that was missing in the default DI container provided by Microsoft is the support for Keyed or Named Services. This feature allows you to register the same type multiple times using different names, allowing you to resolve a specific instance based on the circumstances. Although there is some controversy if supporting this feature is a good idea or not, it certainly can be handy. To support this feature a new interface IKeyedServiceProvider got introduced in .NET 8 providing 2 new methods on our ServiceProvider instance: object? GetKeyedService(Type serviceType, object? serviceKey); object GetRequiredKeyedService(Type serviceType, object? serviceKey); To use it, we need to register our service using one of the new extension methods: Resolving the service can be done either through the FromKeyedServices attribute: or by injecting the IKeyedServiceProvider interface and calling the GetRequiredKeyedServic...
Read more

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

Kubernetes–Limit your environmental impact

Reducing the carbon footprint and CO2 emission of our (cloud) workloads, is a responsibility of all of us. If you are running a Kubernetes cluster, have a look at Kube-Green . kube-green is a simple Kubernetes operator that automatically shuts down (some of) your pods when you don't need them. A single pod produces about 11 Kg CO2eq per year( here the calculation). Reason enough to give it a try! Installing kube-green in your cluster The easiest way to install the operator in your cluster is through kubectl. We first need to install a cert-manager: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/cert-manager/cert-manager/releases/download/v1.14.5/cert-manager.yaml Remark: Wait a minute before you continue as it can take some time before the cert-manager is up & running inside your cluster. Now we can install the kube-green operator: kubectl apply -f https://github.com/kube-green/kube-green/releases/latest/download/kube-green.yaml Now in the namespace where we want t...
Read more