Why am I getting an error stating 'The certificate authority is invalid or incorrect' when opening my .NET 1.1 project in VS2003

Question

(I just wrestled with this issue and didn't find much out there so I'm dumping my problem and resolution here)

We've had a .NET 1.1 web project under development hosted on a Windows 2k3 server which had a valid SSL certificate installed on the website hosting the project. There were no problems opening the solution and its projects while they were being hosted on this server.

I recently got the project under source control. However, after checking out a local working copy I can no longer open one of the project files. I get an error stating '...The certificate authority is invalid or incorrect.'

My local Dev PC is running Windows XP Pro SP3. IIS 5.1 is using a self-singed certificate (generated with OpenSSL) issued to localhost which is installed on the web site hosting the project locally. I can access the web site using a browser with no problems (other than an initial untrusted CA warning). The .vbproj.webinfo and .sln files for the project and solution are referencing localhost.

Answer 1

I don't know the cause of the issue but I was able to resolve it.

Adding the following line to the project's Web.Config file corrected the issue

<identity impersonate="true" userName="<userName>" password="<pass>"/>

where 'userName' and 'pass' were my domain credentials. (This is obviously terrible with regard to security but the file is only on my local dev PC. If you need to protect impersonation creds they can be stored in the registry.) Using the creds for an administrator user on the local machine did not resolve the issue.

Again, I don't know why this resolved the issue or why a domain user resolved it when a local admin didn't. If anyone has any insight, feel free to enlighten.