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I'm working on a UWP application in Visual Studio on Windows. We distribute our app by signing it with a DigiCert certificate, which comes with a USB key that is required to be present when signing.

Unfortunately, Visual Studio won't make or run debug builds without the USB key present either. I can't even press the "Run" button in VS to test my work. If I do this without the key present, the build fails with "No certificate found with the supplied thumbprint".

This is very inconvenient since we have several developers who work on the application including some who are remote, and not everyone can have the key at the same time.

The solution we use today is to open Package.appmanifest and switch to a private key when doing development, then switch it back to the real key when we want to do a release. This is cumbersome.

I don't understand why Visual Studio wants to sign debug/development builds. Can this be turned off?

Flarosa
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  • A cloud based signing server on AWS might work (AWS supports virtual hardware-based-key storage). Digicert also has some kind of cloud-based signing solution. Azure might do this too bit we're an AWS shop. All code-signing certs will need to be hardware-locked starting June 2023 so there will eventually be more and better cloud signing methods. That said, being able to run debug builds without signing would be nice. – Dave S Sep 29 '22 at 20:02

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