Daily Archives: October 4, 2004

Fall views in Vermont

Vermont

Yesterday Rich and I hiked south on the Long Trail from the Appalachian Gap. From near the Theron Shelter there is a great ledge where we ate lunch looking east at the Green Mountains and beyond to the White Mountains.

Here is a photo (well, 3). Click on it for an larger wide view. My camera does not do justice to the real thing.

Off to present at two Montreal User Group Meetings

Just Rambling

It’s a great day for a drive and good thing as I am heading up to Montreal for a few days.

I am speaking at two user groups. Tonight I will be presenting at GUVSM, basically translates as Montreal Visual Studio User Group. They will be getting the first outing of my Web Services Security for Dummies with WSE2 presentation that I have been working on for quite some time. The group is run by Regional Director Guy Barrette and the ever-charming Eric Coté. Mario Cardinal will also be doing a presentation on the Microsoft Application Blocks tonight. Mario is slated to do an extended version of this talk for Vermont.NET in January, also.

Tomorrow night, I will be speaking at GUMSNET – this is the Microsoft Montreal .NET Architecture Group. At this meeting I will be presenting on What’s new in the .NET 2.0 Base Class Libraries for ASP.NET Developers (aka there’s more to asp.net than system.web). Thanks to user group leader Sylvain Groulx for the invitation and for covering my overnight stay since it is about a 3 hour drive each way.

My Alma Mater, Wells College, going co-ed after 136 years

Purely Personal

Change is hard, but this is heart breaking. I know that the dynamics of being at a small all women’s college was one of the defining factors in becoming the person that I am now. There is an interesting article here about the evolution of many women’s colleges in central new york to co-ed institutions. Notable on that list is Cazenovia College as I grew up in Caz and remember the hullabaloo over their going co-ed.

Ahhh Wells. It is a very special place and in reality, I don’t think that the addition of male students is going to change that. When I lived in Dutchess County, I had the great example of Vassar College nearby. That went co-ed many years ago and remains a very very special place. The spirit of what is special about Wells College is quite embedded into every brick, every blade of grass on that campus and in the hearts of every alum. So I have great confidence that this won’t change.

Painful late night lessons with X509 Certificates

WSE

well it wasn’t a late night when I started.

I had to do some reconfiguration on the machine that I am using to do my wse2 demo tomorrow night at GUVSM in Montreal.

I am recreating some of these demos from scratch so I was practicing… 😉

Suddenly I was getting errors on my user of an X509 Certificate.

Cryptography_CSP_NoPrivateKey

That was easily googled and the answer (in the newsgroups by the master himself … Jeffrey Hasan) with the notion that there was something wrong with my certificate installs.

That made perfect sense since I changed my windows login password today and that wipes them out. However I checked them and they were still there, so I didn’t worry. But now, I deleted and attempted (note that key word…) to reinstall them.

I was able to install 2 of the 3 sample certificates but was getting an error when imorting the private server certificate into the Local Computer/Personal store. The error is

“an internal error occurred. The private key that you are importing might require a cryptographic service provider that is not installed on your system.”

So I googled and found lots of problems with windows 2000 server. After about an hour of this, I was grabbing at straws, installed the certificate elsewhere and then just dragged and dropped it into the place I wanted. Tada. Problem solved. (Temporarily, since I do want to know why I can no longer import into that store.)

Almost.

However, in my reproduction of my demos I had forgotten something important.

I was now getting a new error message when running my demo that said :

The certificate’s trust chain could not be verfied with the following reaons: A certificate chain processed, but terminated in a root certificate which is not trusted by the trust provider.

Now I was really frustrated. I googled again with no real luck. Then poked around the newsgroups again and saw something that triggered my memory that I needed to check “Allow Test Roots” in the WSE Settings (or just hand code this into web.config).

So all is well now and I have added some google juice to future people who may have these problems as well.

And as we all know, these lessons are painful and exhausting, but they are the lessons that really ingrain this stuff into your head.