IOS Developer Certificate and Profile Nightmare

Each year around this time, I have to renew my developer certificate and Provisioning profile. This is the second time I am renewing and it is always the same nightmare. It is a frustrating experience!

Problems generally begin by the nagging alarm warning message on your iPhone or iPad devices "Provisioning profile so&so is about to expire in XYZ" and two buttons Remind Me (that's my button) and Show Me which I hate because usually you turned your phone to do something else and the warning message is really not welcome at that time.

A few days later you are compiling the latest version of your app, and kaboom, you get an error telling you that you have a signing problem. What? A signing problem?

You click ^⌘O to open the XCode organizer, and holly crap most of your profiles have a yellow triangle in the left column and a large, looming sign below telling you that you are doomed!

Quick search on the Apple developer forum for "A valid signing identity matching this profile could not be found" will return a big zero!

Google is better and will return 1500+ hits of miserable IOS developers, in the same predicament, who also suddenly lost their profiles and are searching for a solution. I like the "What the @$! is a Signing identity?" post. This guy is kaput for a week at least.

Solution

1. Hope you got a valid developer account and/or renewed your membership. If not Renew!
2. To check certificates and Profiles Go to IOS provisioning portal 
3. If your Developer certificate is invalid
1. Click on Certificate and verify that you have a valid certificate
2. If not Apple does not tell you how to renew, because there is no renew
3. You must revoke the certificate using the button on the righ
4. Recreate a new certificate from zero exactly as you did the first time (Check the How To)
5. Wait a few seconds and click refresh. Apple does not refresh these pages automatically and the first time I did that I waited like an imbecile ten minutes in front of that screen.
6. An Email is sent to the big kahuna who manages your account, the "Agent", to accept your demand. If you are the Agent, you see a line appear in the Team Signing Request, click Approve or Reject if there was an error. 
7. Refresh the view and you certificate should be ready to download!
8. Download the certificate (A file ending in .cer)
9. Double click on it to install it in your keychain
10. Wait a minute here. If you changed your developer certificate, provisioning profiles could be invalid and you may have to do the steps below too. Don't forget to click on Edit to reenable the developers.
4. Renew your developing profile(s) 
1. Apple provided a Renew button here but remember to check with Edit>Modify that you are using the new Developer certificate and that your developer identity is checked in the Certificates section.
2. Select the devices used for debugging
3. Submit
4. Wait a few seconds, and refresh the view until you see the download button
5. Download the developer profile (ending in .mobileprovision)
6. Drop the file in your organiser

If you didn't do it already download the iPhone Configuration Utility it is a very useful tool to check certificate, profiles etc/

I use it also to quickly install and enable or disable apps in the devices by uninstalling them, instead of running XCode or using iTunes.

You can also quickly install profiles in your device