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

DevToys–A swiss army knife for developers

As a developer there are a lot of small tasks you need to do as part of your coding, debugging and testing activities.  DevToys is an offline windows app that tries to help you with these tasks. Instead of using different websites you get a fully offline experience offering help for a large list of tasks. Many tools are available. Here is the current list: Converters JSON <> YAML Timestamp Number Base Cron Parser Encoders / Decoders HTML URL Base64 Text & Image GZip JWT Decoder Formatters JSON SQL XML Generators Hash (MD5, SHA1, SHA256, SHA512) UUID 1 and 4 Lorem Ipsum Checksum Text Escape / Unescape Inspector & Case Converter Regex Tester Text Comparer XML Validator Markdown Preview Graphic Color B
Read more

Help! I accidently enabled HSTS–on localhost

I ran into an issue after accidently enabling HSTS for a website on localhost. This was not an issue for the original website that was running in IIS and had a certificate configured. But when I tried to run an Angular app a little bit later on http://localhost:4200 the browser redirected me immediately to https://localhost . Whoops! That was not what I wanted in this case. To fix it, you need to go the network settings of your browser, there are available at: chrome://net-internals/#hsts edge://net-internals/#hsts brave://net-internals/#hsts Enter ‘localhost’ in the domain textbox under the Delete domain security policies section and hit Delete . That should do the trick…
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