Summary

The topics covered in this chapter are key for building applications that communicate securely. To be able to establish the identity of the various parties that you are communicating with so that you know only the person you intend to read your messages is indeed the person you are sending them to, you need to use certificates. To be able to use certificates, you need the ability to request and retrieve certificates. Although part of what you learned in this chapter can only be used with Microsoft's Certificate Server, the process of actually creating the certificate requests can be used with any Certificate Authority, regardless of which Certificate Server they might be running.

In the next chapter, you'll dig into the certificate store and see how you can build applications to find certificates and to manage the certificates in your certificate store. This will be another key element to building complete and secure messaging applications.