Adding a web service in VS 2008 using a digital certificate

Question

Hi, I am trying access a webservice which require a digital certificate. I have installed the certificate on my local machine. When I try to add a web reference through VS 2005 UI, I get an error saying "Could not create SSL/TLS connection". Any Help?

Answer 1

This is a common problem. There's a solution. I'll try to find it and post it here.

EDIT:

I'm sorry for posting without the solution. I'll not do that again. I guess I just wanted you knowing in the meantime that you're not the only one having this problem.

I couldn't find the technical cause of this, but getting this to work smoothly can really prove to be a pain in your backside. I'm not even sure it's only one thing that can cause this behavior. I recall one cause having something to do with the webserver requesting the client certificate twice during the request and Visual Studio not being capable of meeting that need.

I found this Save the WSDL to a location on your machine "solution". It's not ideal, but you may find that proceeding that way saves you a lot of trouble.

I know I solved this before, but I don't remember how. I've not used the idea in the link above. Last time we had this problem, we hosted the WSDL via HTTP long enough to pull it into VS.

We override our endpoint URLs at runtime, which means we can add the web reference with a URL that's completely different than the URL we'll use at runtime.