Deploying .NET 2.0 security settings without SDK or caspol

This article applies to Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Security
keywords: CAS, full, trust, assembly, security, policy, mscorcfg.msc caspol.exe

When you want to adjust the security settings in .NET 2.0 you use the mscorcfg.msc tool (Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Configuration)

However sometimes in a production environment you might need to do the same thing in a bunch of machines, and the problem is that the mscorcfg.msc tool is only included in the SDK which is over 300 MB, another option is to use the caspol command line, but that will scare most people away, there are a lot of people having this problem, so I thought I would post an easier solution here.

I lied on the title of the article, you do need to the SDK, but only in one machine, since you are a developer (right?) I suppose you have Visual Studio, and that includes the SDK, if you don't have the SDK installed on any machine, then you need to download it and install it at least on one machine.

Once you have that you can use the mscorcfg tool, setup the machine with the permissions that you want, trust assemblies, adjust zone security settings, etc, then when you are done, use this option

Configure Code Access Security Policy







Create Deployment Package






you will see a new dialog, which doesn't have many options


this dialog is a bit weird and buggy, but all you have to specify is a file name in some valid folder, for example c:\SecuritySettings

the other thing you might want to change is the security policy level to deploy, if you are deploying to production machines you might need Machine or User
click Next, then finish.

What this little wizard does, it creates a package with all the security settings on that machine, and puts it in a simple small executable program that you can run in any machine to adjust the security settings to match that machine.

now all you need to do, is take that file to the machines where you want to deploy your new security settings, run it and you're done

When you run the file you are naturally tempted to wait for a dialog to come up and ask you to click next, next, next, finish, but no dialog will pop up, you'll see it flash for a second and then it will dissapear, that's all it does (you might need privileged rights to run that file), if you were able to run that file, the security settings have been changed.

now if "it works on my machine!", you can make it work in other machines too =o)