Clickonce Manifest Woes - The deployment identity does not match the subscription

As blogged about previously, the organization I work for has a number of developer tools which are published using Clickonce which provides quite a lot of functionality for very little overhead. However, this morning I attempted to update and re-publish one of said applications I realized that the certificate with which the application was originally deployed had expired. Since we do not use private (trusted) certificates, I was able to click the ‘Create Test Certificate’ in Visual Studio to create another certificate. Everything seemed fine – I deployed the application without any issue and even tested it on my box. Everything worked nicely.

Later in the day I received an email from a colleague who had received a rather unsavory error message in his attempt to open the application. It read:

“The deployment identity does not match the subscription.”

It was pretty clear that this was directly related to the change in manifest…after a quick google I realized that I was not the first user this happened to (nor the 100th). It has been logged as a bug on Microsoft Comment with the status of having ‘been fixed in the Orcas release’.

http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?FeedbackID=207513

It also has its own page on Microsoft Support which explains it as a conflict of certificates – suggesting two workarounds:

  • Uninstalling and re-installing the application (and totally defeating the purpose of click-once applications). This is fine for small applications with a (very) limited user base – but for enterprise class applications this approach is pretty much unacceptable.
  • Creating a command line assembly to update the certificate – it was too late for me but this is a method I will certainly test in the future as this will undoubtedly happen 365 days from now J The whole support article can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?kbid=925521

Comments

Jeff said…
I've just ran into the same problem. What a shame for ClickOnce. This issue is just one of several that I've run into trying to utilize ClickOnce and I'm almost ready to conclude that it is just not worth the all the hassle.

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