Signing a .Net satellite assembly

Solution

Strong named satellite assemblies are assemblies that have been signed with a public key in Catalyst.

Below is a screenshot of Tools > Options > .Net Framework in Catalyst. This is where we provide our support for strong named satellite assemblies.

The public key mentioned above is the *.snk key and the arrow shows where this is assigned in the screenshot above.

What Catalyst really does is to follow the process described in the link below:

The process is based on the principal that a company will have a public and a private key when they are localizing their software.

The private key will be a closely guarded secret only known by a couple of people in the company.

Therefore it is assumed that the private key is not freely available to the Catalyst users that will be extracting the satellite dlls.

As a work around to this issue Catalyst implements delayed signing.

The way that this works is the public key will be specified in the satellite assembly at extraction as shown in the screenshot above.

In this way Catalyst delay signs the satellite assembly.

When the company is ready to deploy a delay signed assembly, it can be signed with the private key.