Fourth Version, LLC

You know those times when you reeeally feed like you need to get something done but you know something…just something…is going to get in your way. And that thing that gets in your way will require more time than you would have anticipated thus causing you to NOT get as much done as you’d like to. Yeah, that’s what happened to me tonight.

This week has been a tad bit hectic (blog post coming up) and needless to say I haven’t been keeping up with things on the regular.  I started a new job and went through the brutal process of selling my car. As you can well imagine, I didn’t have too many moments to spare all week.  While both exciting and challenging, nothing has come up this week work-wise that has stopped me in my tracks, until tonight.  My CTO asked me to find my iPod 1st generation device and debug it because it was crashing. Sounds like a piece of cake right? Riiiiight. Not so fast.

Normally it would have been a piece of cake but it turns out the numerous warnings that were coming from all my devices were really there to remind me that my freaking Developer Certificate WAS EXPIRING!  Up until this point I had always noticed in the iOS provisioning portal that my certificate was expiring and it allowed me to renew it. But this time when I logged in, the certificate was gone. Gone, gone, gone. The only mention of it was on a Certificate “History” tab which gave me the feeling that it indeed was gone.

So this is the part where I tell you it took me an absurd amount of time trying to figure out how to renew my certificate, ultimately giving up and creating a new one and that’s the trick ,riiiiiight? Again, not so fast. Yes I did spend an obscene amount of time  trying to figure out how to renew it. Yes what I did was kind of giving up and creating a new one. And yes I don’t really know where I am going with this long post.

Focus….so, what do you do when your certificate expires? Well, assuming you have the expired certificate stored in Keychain on your Mac all you have to do is follow a few simple steps.

1. In the Provisioning Portal, create a new certificate (I know this sounds counter intuitive but just go with me). On your Mac, make a new request to the certificate authority with the same information as the original. It should be filled in for you. Save it to disk instead of emailing it on finish.
2. When it gives you a step 2. to Upload the request, upload the file you saved in step one.
3. Approve the request.
4. Refresh the page and download the new certificate.
5. Double click on the certificate to activate Keychain and voila. All done.
6. Optional. If you want to take that certificate to ANOTHER machine, right click on the certificate in Keychain and export it as a .p12. I can’t stress enough how important that is. Once you’ve done that take it over to the other Mac and double click on the file. Once you enter the password for it the machine will import the certificate and you’ll be ready to rock on devices from that machine.

And the rest as they say is history folks. Hope this saves you some time.

UPDATE: In the ultimate RTFM scenario, I found the following in Apple’s “iOS Development Guide”. Waaaaaaayyyy easier that what I was doing. Enjoy.

Managing Your Digital Identities

When you request a certificate from the iPhone Provisioning Portal, a public/private key pair is generated. The public key is included in your certificate. The private key is stored in your keychain. With these items, Xcode code-signs the applications you build with it. If you need to use another computer to develop iOS applications, you must transfer these digital-identification items to the other computer. You can do this in the Xcode Organizer.

To export your digital-identification items to a secure file, follow these steps:

1. Open the Xcode Organizer.
2. In the IPHONE DEVELOPMENT group, select Developer Profile.
3. Click Export Developer Profile.
4. Name the file, select a location for it, enter a password to secure the file, and click Save.

Now, when you need to develop iOS applications on another computer, import your digital-identification items into it by performing these steps:

1. Copy the developer-profile archive to the second computer.
2. On the second computer, launch Xcode.
3. Open the Organizer.
4. In the IPHONE DEVELOPMENT group, select Developer Profile.
5. Click Import Developer Profile.
6. Locate the archive, enter the password used to secure it, and click Open.