Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Code signing for the independent developer

One of the features introduced with Silverlight 4 was the out-of-browser feature, enabling you to create an application that can be installed, run offline, automatically updated, etc.  As a part of that feature, some of the major code signing certificate vendors (for Authenticode certs) provided our team with test certificates so that we could go through the same process as a developer would to acquire the cert and apply it to an app…and, of course, validate it works.

During that time some of those vendors had promotional codes for the first year for Silverlight developers, providing reduced-rate (but not reduced quality) code-signing certificates for their apps.  Still during this time there were a lot that questioned why some providers were still expensive and didn’t value “the little guy.”  By that I mean that there are a lot of smaller firms or independent personal developers.  The thought of dropping a few hundred dollars on a cert is sometimes tough.

Last week a representative contacted me about their offerings as a premier partner of one of those providers.  Certs4less.com is now offering Thawte code-signing certificates for individual developers.  They are doing this at a price of $99 per year (less for multi-year).

    NOTE: As a part of this, like before with SL4, Certs4Less graciously offered a promotional cert for me to validate the end-to-end process so that I could speak accurately about it.  I do not use any of these certs provided by these companies for testing purpose toward any production application and they are for testing purposes only.  Besides, I’ve not found the time to write production code for apps lately ;-).  I am not getting paid for this post, nor am I getting another promo code for personal use myself.  I am simply providing what I think is valuable information and get no compensation from Thawte or Certs4Less.

I went through the process of obtaining this cert from Certs4Less.com and it produced exactly what you’d expect, a valid Authenticode code-signing certificate I can use for my Silverlight and Windows 8 application packages!  I shared a few points of feedback with the contact there and will enumerate them here for you as well (as well as some tips)

Read more: Method ~ of ~ failed
QR: code-signing-for-independent-developer.aspx

Posted via email from Jasper-Net