Hi all, The other day I needed to use the certificate chain context ( CERT_CHAIN_CONTEXT structure ) returned by a call to InternetQueryOption , in C# . The call in C++ looks like this: PCCERT_CHAIN_CONTEXT CertCtx=NULL; … if (InternetQueryOption...

Hi all, Some time ago a customer of mine wanted to develop PowerShell scripts to manage printers in their clustered environment. They wanted to use WMI for that. The problem they found is that while they could list the printers on a stand-alone...

Hi all, Some time ago I had a customer how had developed a custom credential provider to use with a third-party smartcard provider . This credential provider was a wrapper of MS Smartcard Credential Provider . They also put a credential provider...

Hi all, The other day a customer of mine was trying to compile and run this CertEnroll sample of mine: How to create a certificate request with CertEnroll and .NET (C#) I had developed this sample against .NET 2.0 some time ago, and it compiled...

Hi all, A customer of mine wanted to set Issuer Alternative Name ( XCN_OID_ISSUER_ALT_NAME2 - "2.5.29.18" ) extension to his certificate requests in C# in the same way we did this, and he didn't know how: How to add Subject Alternative Name to...

Hi all, If you are creating certificate requests to enroll certificates programmatically and using a code like the following: How to create a certificate request with CertEnroll and .NET (C#) , you may need to export the enrolled certificate after...

Hi all, You may know already this white paper to configure the Certificate Enrollment Web Services : Certificate Enrollment Web Services in Windows Server 2008 R2 " This paper explains how certificate enrollment Web services work in Windows...

Hi all, One of my customers was creating certificate requests programmatically with CertEnroll and a code like the following: How to create a certificate request with CertEnroll and .NET (C#) . He wanted to set Friendly Name for the enrolled certificate...

Hi all, The other day a customer of mine was creating certificate requests with a code like the following: How to create a certificate request with CertEnroll and .NET (C#) . He wanted to set the certificate's Key Usage to Digital Signature instead...

Hi all, The other day a customer of mine was creating certificate requests with a code like the following: How to create a certificate request with CertEnroll and .NET (C#) . After he enrolled the certificates, he realized that when he tried to...

Hi all, We've already seen How to add Subject Alternative Name to your certificate requests (C#) . What if we want to set Alternative Directory Name ( XCN_CERT_ALT_NAME_DIRECTORY_NAME ) in addition to Subject Alternative Name ( XCN_CERT_ALT_NAME_RFC822_NAME...

Hi all, The other day a customer of mine wanted to add Subject Alternative Name ( szOID_SUBJECT_ALT_NAME2 - "2.5.29.17" ) extension to his certificate requests in C# and he didn't know how. We have IX509ExtensionAlternativeNames interface for...

Hi all, Some time ago I mentioned a Microsoft SDK sample that uses CertEnroll to access the Certificate Enrollment Web Services and enroll a certificate using a template : How to access the new Certificate Enrollment Web Services programmatically...

Hi all, A customer of mine wanted to change the error messages shown to users when changing their password on Windows 7, e.g. when new and old passwords won't match, or the old password of the user is invalid, etc. On Windows XP they did that with...

Hi all, Some time ago a customer of mine was developing a native application using Fax API , which worked fine on Windows Server 2003 . On Windows Server 2008 though, when the application was being run as a service , they could see that FaxSendDocument...

Hi all, When connecting to an SSL-enabled web site with Internet Explorer , the client and server must negotiate an SSL session . The server sends its list of trusted root certificates to the client in the form of a non-encrypted record. The server...

Hi all, Some time ago I had a customer who was opening a SSL connection on his C# application, and he was calling SslStream.AuthenticateAsClient . His problem was that this call was taking around 15 seconds for each connection he made. I debugged...

Hi all, The following C# sample shows how to create a memory mapped file and use private namespaces to allow access to specific groups of users: FORM1.CS using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.ComponentModel; using...

Hi all, The other day a customer of mine was trying to verify the validity of a certificate with a .NET code like the following: Dim cert As X509Certificate2 = New X509Certificate2(filename) Dim chain As New X509Chain() chain.ChainPolicy.RevocationFlag...

Hi all, Some time ago a customer of mine was getting a CryptographicException with message "The Smart card resource manager is not running" when using X509Certificate2 object in a Windows service . This was the call stack at the point of exception...

Hi all, If you call SCardEstablishContext API in a Windows service running under a specific user account (domain\user) or NETWORK SERVICE , you may get the following error on Vista/Server 2008 or Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 : 0x8010001d - SCARD_E_NO_SERVICE...

Hi all, The other day I created a VBScript to automate DiskPart.exe tool and be able to perform tasks on a disk after selecting it by LUN ID . Note that Diskpart only allow us to select disks by their index number or their location path. Bellow...

Hi all, The other day a customer of mine was trying to sign a binary with SignTool.exe using the following command line on Windows Server 2008 SP2 : Signtool.exe sign /a /f "c:\mycert.pfx" /p "password" /t "http://timestamp.verisign.com/scripts...

Hi all, A customer of mine had to add a list of thousands of applications to the "Run only specified windows applications" GPO on his Windows Server 2008 . And obviously he wanted to automate this task to avoid adding them manually one at a time...

Hi all, A customer of mine was trying to monitor a .log file in a specific folder with .NET's FileSystemWatcher class and a code like the following: static void Main(string[] args) { FileSystemWatcher fsw = new FileSystemWatcher(@...