Homemade certificates for the web developers

Working with the web, you will definitely end up having to generate a trusted certificate at least for your localhost. In my case, I have been working with certificates a bit more and the need of a personal CA was obviously the best solution. Moreover, I wanted to modify Fiddler's CA name to avoid having the ugly "DO_NOT_TRUST_FiddlerRoot". This post describes how I automated the certificate generation process and also mitigated the Firefox's warning about the old SHA1 hashing.

Renew expired pfx certificates for click once applications

If you used the click once technology back in visual studio 2005 you have saved yourself a lot of hassle deploying newer versions, especially during the UAT phase. Unfortunately, if you used a dev certificate from visual studio and now you have to do a minor update, you will discover that the certificate has expired and visual studio won't allow you to use it to create a new click once deployment. Although Microsoft has suggested a couple of ways to tackle the problem, replacing the certificate is not an option in most of the cases and the provided code doesn't work that well. Cliff Stanford has fixed the provided codebase and I have uploaded a slightly modified version in github in order to preserve it.
The main modification is that I add 105 years to the expiration date, in order to avoid redoing the process every 5 years :)
Enjoy

Create self signed certificate

Visual studio comes with an exquisite tool to create a self signed certificate which you can use for Exchange/IIS/ADFS/whatever you like.

makecert -r -pe -n "CN=name.domain.com" -e 01/01/2020 -ss my -sr localMachine -sky exchange -sp "Microsoft RSA SChannel Cryptographic Provider" -sy 12

Note that this will store the certificate in your local machine certificate store but it’s marked as “private key exportable” (-pe) so you can export it from there.

 I have also created a .bat file in order to automate the localhost certificate generation. Don't forget to export the ca.localhost certificate and add it as a trusteed root certificate authority.