ClickOnce certificate expiration
I just heard about a pretty nasty "bug" with ClickOnce. Well it isn't an actual bug but still a nasty problem to run into.
The problem is actually with the certificate used to sign a ClickOnce installer. When you create a new ClickOnce installer Visual Studio will automatically generate the required certificate for you. And the intention was that this was only a temporary certificate and that a developer would replace it with a real one. Now it turns out that most people, including me, think there is only a single advantage to using a real and that is the claim that the certificate is from an untrusted publisher. Well that is only a warning most people ignore anyway so why bother with the real certificate.
Well it turns out there is a second, much larger, disadvantage to using the generated certificate. And that is the fact that it is only valid for a single year. And after that year the ClickOnce installation will stop downloading new updates.
More information, including a workaround, can be found here.
Thanks to Eric Knox and Cory Smith for pointing this out.
Enjoy!