There are a number of reasons you may (or may not) want to sign your assemblies, but if you do, here is a simple way of doing it in Visual Studio.
- Create a snk file by opening a Visual Studio command prompt as Administrator <—IMPORTANT (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229859%28v=vs.110%29.aspx)
- sn -k <YOUR SNK FILE NAME>.snk
- Then create a Public Key
- sn -p <YOUR SNK FILE NAME>.snk <YOUR PUBLIC KEY FILE NAME>.PublicKey
- Get your Public Key Token
- sn -tp <YOUR PUBLIC KEY FILE NAME>.PublicKey
- this will output your public key and token to the console, make note of it
Full output from the console will look like this:
- Next, go to the properties of the project containing your assembly you want to sign, and click on the Signing tab.
- Check Sign the assembly
- Click the dropdown and Browse to the newly created snk file that you created in Step 1
The reason you want to note your public key and public key token is for use in your app.config or for InternalsVisibleTo.
For example, if the assembly you have signed needs to be specified in an InternalsVisibleTo in the assemblyinfo file, you would specify it like this:
<assembly: InternalsVisibleTo("MySignedAssemblyName, PublicKey=<font style="background-color: #ffff00">0024000004800000940000000602000000240000525341310004000001000100155b8d9138457a0be37b064f4f0fa70ceb948f08a7855122f1d6fe9cb89e74b68d60853358a061482d5e62423881caf1cf276d82b11a2e6075939181ab9e1c3dadfcf23082b04d15fb5f9ca20da5bc99b29f830e5c5d23ae9d3dee6f609d0980ed8ba584f348d48921055e13e66c987f5c5712e15285235cb649f0a1e65c0bb2</font>") />
Or, if you were referencing the assembly in your app.config for a custom Logging handler using Enterprise Library, it would look like this:
<exceptionTypes>
<add name="All Exceptions"
type="System.Exception, mscorlib, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"
postHandlingAction="NotifyRethrow">
<exceptionHandlers>
<add
type="MyCustomLogExceptionHandlerClassName, MySignedCustomLogHandlerAssemblyName, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=<font style="background-color: #ffff00">0b4def2ce7bdd21a</font>"
name="LogExceptionHandler" />
</exceptionHandlers>
</add>
</exceptionTypes>
This works nicely.
You might want to add that once you sign an assembly A, you’ll need to sign all the dependencies referenced by A, which need to be compiled.
Thank you sir.