VSoft Technologies Blogs

When deploying .NET applications to production, the difference between a development build and a properly configured production build can be significant. MSBuild provides numerous properties that allow you to optimize your builds for performance, security, and reliability. This article explores essential MSBuild properties for production builds, with particular focus on configuration for CI servers like Continua CI.

We recently had a report from a customer that code signing using Signotaur was taking a long time - in this case around a minute to sign 1 file. This is obviously far too slow for practical use.

It's no secret that we are always working on the next version of FinalBuilder and Automise - that's the nature of software development. That said, the next major versions are taking much longer than we would like - the reason for this is dealing with technical debt (mainly in the area of scripting). With this extended development cycle, there are changes that we finished some time ago that we decided could not wait for the next major version. We backported those changes to the FinalBuilder 8.x and Automise 5.x - but since some of these changes break project compatibility (with the x.0 releases) we are releasing FinalBuilder 8.5 and Automise 5.5

Inno Setup has long supported code signing  (since v5.2.4).  Fortunately, the way the authors of Inno Setup implemented this feature makes it really easy to use custom tools to do the code signing. In this post we'll take a look at how to use Signotaur with Inno Setup.

Over the last few years, code signing has changed somewhat. With the requirement that private keys be secured, many developers have run into the issues that USB tokens present, or the limitations and costs associated with cloud-based signing solutions. Gone are the days of sharing a PFX file around the dev team or with the CI server (unless you managed to snag a 3-year renewal just before the new requirements were enforced). Signotaur is a self hosted code signing server (and client) that makes sharing certificates simple, all whilst ensuring the private key never leaves the server.

Black Friday sale - 40% off all new licenses until midnight (utc) 8th December 2024.

Windows 11 24H2 breaks scripting in FinalBuilder and Automise - this post details how to work around the issue.

Throughout the lifespan of FinalBuilder and Automise, we have worked very hard to avoid breaking changes - however sometimes they are unavoidable.

50% off all new licenses unti midnight (utc) 28th Nov 2023.

Big changes are coming for OV (Organisation Validation) code signing certificates - from (1 June 2023, extended from 15 November 2022), new and reissued publicly trusted organization validation (OV) and individual validation (IV) code signing certificates will have to be issued or stored on preconfigured secure hardware by the issuing certificate authority (CA) and the device must meet FIPS 140 Level 2, Common Criteria EAL 4+ or equivalent security standards.