downloads, how to provide them

Question

We do have a problem with our downloads that we provide. We have some powershell modules/cmdlets packed into an assembly, packed into a zip file. This file can be downloaded from our customers. The assembly is signed (like a normal exe/dll, I don't know if there's an other fancy cool new 'sign with appx manifest and who knows what else' way). ... but now, when our customers download those zip files and unpack them and try to import those modules, they get the information, that it cannot be loaded because of missing dependencies.
But the point is, that they have to right-click them, then unblock the files (downloaded from internet - bla bla) and after that they can use it.
My question now is... what can I do to prevent this? How do I have to distribute / pack those assemblies so that we don't run into this problem? It's quite annoying to deal with this over and over again...

Rudolf

Answer 1

Unblock the zip file before any contents are extracted. Once the zip file has been unblocked the contents will not need to be unblocked after they have been extracted.

I don't think that there is anything that you can do to prevent "The Mark of the Web" from being applied to downloaded files. For example, even zip files that I have uploaded to my own OneDrive storage will need to be unblocked if I download them! However, since the Mark is actually an NTFS alternate data stream if you save the download to a non-NTFS file system (e.g., USB thumb drive formatted with Fat32) then the downloaded files will not be blocked.