Visual Basic® 2010 Unleashed

Providing Certificates

To make ClickOnce deployments the most trustable possible, you should use a certificate. If you take a look at Solution Explorer after you publish the application, you notice that Visual Studio has signed the assembly with a .pfx strong name. This is good in local test scenarios, but the most convenient way (although not mandatory) for providing security information to customers is adding an Authenticode certificate, especially if your application is deployed via the Internet. Visual Studio adds a test certificate, as demonstrated in Figure 55.13, which shows the Signing tab in My Project.

Figure 55.13 Signing the ClickOnce manifest.

The test certificate is intended for local testing purposes only and should never be used ...