It used to be that creating a self-signed certificate for local IIS debugging was a pain. Without a certificate, anything starting with “https://localhost” was bound to cause an error. There is a simple, two-minute fix that will work for most cases, however.
- Download and install the IIS Diagnostics Toolkit from Microsoft.
- Run the newly installed SSL Diagnostics program
- Right click on your local website and choose “Create new cert”. It will install a two-week locally signed certificate on your machine that is not technically valid, but will at least allow you to test SSL activity.
It turns out that there are a number of very useful tools in the IIS Diagnostics Toolkit:
- WFetch (WFetch.exe). This tool allows you to generate customized HTTP requests and view request and response data.
- Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Diagnostic Tool (SSLDiag). This tool helps you identify configuration problems in the IIS metabase, certificates, or certificate stores when running Web sites that use SSL.
- Authentication and Access Control Diagnostics (authdiag.exe). This tool allows you to review, test, and correct problems with authentication and authorization.
- SMTP Diagnostics. SMTPDiag is a diagnostic tool that is used to determine if Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and Domain Name System (DNS) are configured to reliably deliver mail to an external e-mail address.
- Microsoft Debugging Tools for Windows. This tool allows you to debug and diagnose application problems.
- Log Parser. Log parser is a powerful, versatile tool that provides universal query access to text-based data such as log files, XML files and CSV files, as well as key data sources on the Windows operating system such as the Event Log, the Registry, the file system, and Active Directory.
Speaking of tools, Fiddler is another extremly helpful and free tool from Microsoft for debugging HTTP communication.
