The Agile Micro ISV Blog

A year or two ago, trusted Micro ISV‘er Andy Brice posted an article entitled The Great Digital Certificate Ripoff? It’s well worth a read as it underlines some of the apparent anticompetitive aspects of this particular market.

I’m very happy to say that the ground is shifting – something interesting is happening. Internet Explorer is pretty much universally despised by tech-savvy users, but its sheer market slice means that only a fool would ignore it. As of now, Internet Explorer (and by extension, Windows) will have a new root certificate installed. The root certificate will be that of StartCom Ltd. Why is this important?

StartCom is the only public certification authority providing digital certificates for free!

The implications for security on Windows are profound. No longer will SSL and code signing certificates be expensive commodities for the little guy. Firefox and Apple have supported StartCom for some time, but thankfully us Windows developers can now get in on it.

The SLL certificates are free and provide:

• Web server certificates (SSL/TLS)
• Client and mail certificates (S/MIME)
• 128/256-bit encryption
• US $ 10,000 insurance guaranteed
• Valid 365 days (1 year)

The code signing certificates require a verified account, but still cost a measley $39, and boast:

Web server certificates (SSL/TLS)

Wild cards (*.domain.com)

Multiple domains (DNS Alt Names)

128/256-bit encryption

Object Code Signing (beta)

Client and mail certificates (S/MIME)

US $ 10,000 insurance guaranteed

2 Years validity (730 days)

Well done to StartCom, and well done to Microsoft. Check out the certificates on offer here.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Long Zheng: Microsoft adds free root certificate authority to Windows (istartedsomething.com)
• EV SSL Certificates — Not Just for Major Organizations (newswire.ca)

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

…I’ve just added one to Home Document Manager.

.Net isn’t renowned for it’s cold startup times, and WPF
apps start like standard .Net app after a horse tranquilizer. Home
Document Manager has an ever increasing list of assemblies that it
needs to import at startup and that takes time. This is on top of the
whole WPF stack.

.Net 3.5 SP1 introduced a new SplashScreen
class. You can set the SplashScreen by adding an image to your project
and setting its build properties, or you can use the class directly. I
find this new class a little flaky, as it can throw exceptions under
certain circumstances if it loses focus.

It does raise the question of what to show on a splash screen. Just a fancy graphic/logo? Version info? Website info?

Image via WikipediaThe fun continues.

My
previous problems with the “Incorrect Function” error message when
running the bootstrapper turned out to be a corrupt VM. My current
issues revolve aroung trying to get one of Home Document Manager’s
components to find its resources when deployed.

In ClickOnce, each assembly
is deployed to its own folder, and you have no control over that
folder’s name. Since I have to manually load the resources, this
presented issues. Tonight I’m going to try adding the resources as
‘Data’ and having them copied to the ClickOnce app’s data directory.
This folder I can locate on disk so hopefully, security issues aside, I
should be able to load in the assemblies.