How to: Sign Office solutions

Applies to: Visual Studio Visual Studio for Mac

If you sign a solution, you can grant trust to the solution using the certificate as evidence. You can use the same certificate for multiple solutions, and all the solutions will be trusted with no additional security policy updates.

Applies to: The information in this topic applies to document-level projects and VSTO Add-in projects. See Features available by Office application and project type.

If you manually edit application and deployment manifests by using the Manifest Generation and Editing Tool (mage.exe and mageui.exe), you must re-sign the manifests before you can use them. For more information, see How to: Re-sign application and deployment manifests.

Sign by using a certificate

A certificate is a file that contains a unique key and the identity of the solution publisher. You can purchase certificates from a certificate authority, or create your own certificate and have a certificate authority sign it.

Visual Studio signs Office solutions with a temporary certificate to enable debugging. You should not use the temporary certificate in deployed solutions as evidence.

To sign an Office solution by using a certificate

1. On the Project menu, click SolutionNameProperties.

2. Click the Signing tab.

3. Select Sign the ClickOnce manifests.

4. Locate the certificate by clicking Select from Store or Select from File and navigating to the certificate.

5. To verify that the correct certificate is being used, click More Details to view the certificate information.

See also

• Secure Office solutions
• Grant trust to Office solutions
• Signing Page, Project Designer