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Critical Update: Windows 3.7.1. Release
11 Nov 2014

A certificate in the Windows platform template has expired on 11/11/2014 and as a result, building Windows using the Cordova CLI currently fails. This affects all existing projects and any new projects created using the command line prior to Cordova versions <= 4.0.0.

Note that this does not affect the WP8 platform.

Error Message

When building Cordova for Windows, you may seen an error message that looks something like this

cordova run windows

C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v12.0\AppxPackage\Microsoft.AppXPackage.Targets(1772,9): error APPX0108: The certificate specified has expired. 

For more information about renewing certificates, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=241478.

Workaround

This issue will be fixed in the next release of the Cordova CLI

However, to ensure that you can continue building your existing Cordova projects for Windows till then, please replace the expired certificate located at yourCordovaProject\platforms\windows\CordovaApp_TemporaryKey.pfx with a new one from here. Ensure that the downloaded file is renamed to CordovaApp_TemporaryKey.pfx

You can also remove the Windows platform using cordova platform remove windows and add it again, specifiying a version like cordova platform add windows@3.7.1. This picks up the latest release of the Windows platform that has a newer certificate.

Long term fix

We are working on a long term fix to generate this certificate dynamically. This way, the certificates are not checked into Cordova repositories and will not expire.