iPhone development us usually very enjoyable using the Apple’s excellent development tools. However, Apple’s user experience experts must have been on vacation when they designed the iPhone code signing process. Particularly the error messages seem to be designed to confuse rather than help.
This happened on a project where we have multiple iPhone developers both at our company and at the client working in parallel. One day out of the blue we were greeted with the dreaded “unexpected error (0xE800003A)” when deploying to our development devices. Since it’s been about a year since the iPhone development program started, the first thought was that a certificate had expired.
A a wild goose chase ensued following Craig Hockenberry’s sage advice regarding expired certificates, with several variations and extensions, and other fascinating dead-ends. Still same unhelpful error message.
Finally we discovered that one developer had created an AdHoc configuration and in that process created the Entitlements.plist file. That is all well and good. But he had added Entitlements.plist to both the AdHoc and the Debug configuration. Not so good.
After removing that one line in the build settings, normality was restored.
Hopefully this will save someone else a few hours and some sanity.
Other good code signing resources:
Post from iPhone Development Blog Copyright © 2009 Nick Dalton - iPhone Developer
Your mobile device has encountered an unexpected error (0xE800003A)