VSoft Technologies Blogs

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.

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.

This new beta release includes substantial improvements to the expressions engine including new several expressions objects and functions. We have also made some updates to the stage editor, implemented automatic report generation for some reporting actions, and added several new deployment actions providing support for Docker, Azure, SQL packages, File Transfer and SSH.

Today we released version 1.9 of Continua CI. Here's a summary of the main new features.

I'm not usually one for publishing roadmaps, mostly because I don't like to promise something and not deliver. That said, we've had a few people ask recently what is happening with Continua CI. This post outlines our plans for the rest of 2018 and into the future.

SSL standards are changing, and older SSL/TSL protocols are slowly being deprecated, or even turned off by some services. This post shows how to enable TLS 1.2 support in Continua CI.

In this post, I'm going to look at how to structure a FinalBuilder project so that it will run on your dev machine, or on your Continua CI Server without modification. This allows the best of both worlds, develop and debug your build process on your development machine, and then later run it on your CI server.

Continuous Integration Servers are often underspecified when it comes to hardware. In the early days of Automated Builds, the build server was quite often that old pc in the corner of the office, or an old server in the data center that no one else wanted. Developers weren't doing many builds per day, so it worked, it was probably slow but that didn't seem to matter much. Fast forward 20 years, and the CI server is now a critical service. The volume and frequency of builds has increased dramatically, and a slow CI server can be a real problem in an environment where we want fast feedback on that code we just committed (even though it "worked on my machine"). Continuous Deployment only adds to the workload of the CI server. In this post I'm going to cover off some ideas to hopefully improve the performance of your CI server.

The recent Visual Studio 2017 Update (also known as VS 15.3) introduced a problem with command line compilation when the Lightweight Solution Load feature is enabled. **Update 25 Sept 2017*** : Microsoft have closed our bug report with a Wont Fix status.. seems they are too busy with other things.