Question

In Visual Studio’s Project Properties -> Signing tab, I have signed my project with a code-signing certificate. On my team, however, I’m the only one with the code-signing certificate, even though we’re in a multiple-developer environment. When the other developers try to “Start Debugging”, they get the following message:

“cannot find the certificate that matches the project system thumbprint”

Anyone have any suggestions for allowing them to debug their project, but only allow me to publish?

Answer 1

One thing that might work is adding a post-build event to call a script that does your signing. You could use something like signtool.exe to sign the files when you publish them.

You could make multiple versions of a script file, for instance: Debug_sign.bat, Release_sign.bat

Then in your Post-build event command line:

call “$(ProjectDir)$(ConfigurationName)_sign.bat”
would call the correct script depending on your target.

Only the release script would actually sign the output files. The debug script file could just do nothing..

I’ve used signtool to sign an assembly with a .pfx like this:
signtool.exe sign /f “codesign_cert.pfx” /p “cert_password” /d “App description” /du “http://mywebsite” myApp.exe