Publish Building using ClickOnce Stalls forever

Question

We use Click once technology to publish our application. Of late, when trying to do the same the application blocks for ever when the Sign Click once manifest is ticked. However, if this were to be uniticked or if the application were to published in safe mode with networking prompt , the publish build process doesnot hang. On the other hand if the application is run on normal mode with the sign manifest enabled the application always stops at the publish building process.

Note: The certificate used has not expired using the sign tool on the command line works perfectly. I have also repaired VS 2010. Ending the Signtool process from the taskmanager makes the application active again

Kindly help

Answer 1

My guess is it is trying to contact a timestamp server and failing. Run Fiddler while you publish and see if you can see any failed http calls. As to why it is failing, I don't know, but hopefully it will give you a starting point.

The timestamp service stamps the manifest so that when the app's certificate expires, the client can verify that it was signed while the certificate was still valid.