Managing and Troubleshooting SSL Certificates in .NET Applications

Developing secure web applications requires a solid understanding of how SSL/TLS certificates function under the hood. For many developers, a misconfigured certificate store can halt local development, throwing frustrating errors in your IDE and container environments. This text-based course guides you through the mechanics of certificate management, helping you resolve common trust issues and integration bottlenecks. You will start with the fundamental concepts of public key infrastructure, certificate stores, and trust chains before moving into practical configuration. By the end of this course, you will be able to confidently install, trust, and reference local development certificates across your operating system and application containers. What you will learn: Understand the foundational concepts of SSL/TLS certificates and how operating systems store them; Configure local trust for development certificates to prevent browser and IDE warnings; Resolve certificate import issues when running .NET applications inside Docker containers; Manage user and machine certificate stores using command-line tools; Troubleshoot common containerization errors related to missing or untrusted root authorities. We begin by exploring the core terminology of digital certificates and local trust stores. From there, you will learn step-by-step methods to export, import, and verify certificates so they are recognized by both your development environment and your virtualized application containers. This course is designed for beginner to intermediate software developers, DevOps engineers, and system administrators working with secure web applications. No prior experience with certificate administration is required.