Getting a trusted certificate for Visual Studio signing

Question

I need some information about code-signing certificates. I have no idea how they work, and googling has not really cleared any confusion i had.

My IT department are willing to help me set it up, but they do not want to spend any time figuring out how, and asked me to do it.

So what i need to know is, exactly what do i need, to sign my code in Visual Studio (C# in this case), with a permanent key that does not change and can be trusted by our internal systems.

I have tried using our company issuing certificate, but it says it has no private key. IT says they can issue a code-signing template, but they didn't see any private key in that either, and in general had no idea what it did.

Any background knowledge about this, and how to set it up would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You need to buy a code-signing certificate from Verisign or other similar providers and then sign your assemblies with that.

Answer 2

I don't think there's a way of getting one that doesn't time out. For signing on Windows you'll need a Verisign code signing certificate. Microsoft's guide to code signing is very useful. From a developer perspective, once you have the PFX file for the certificate then all you need is the SignTool program.

signtool /n "My company, inc." myfile.exe