SSL with WCF not working! How to Debug

Question

I am dabbling with WCF and SSL and have hit a bit of a problem.

I have a self-hosted WCF service and a basic client which connects to request a token.

I have it set up on my development machine it appears to communicating over SSL just fine.

But when I set it up on a different machine to test the deployment the client keeps getting nothing back from the service.

I assume it has something to do with the certificates I have set up as this is the only thing I think could be different.

I have used the netsh command to associate my port with an existing certificate that was already on the server. And it appears the same as my dev machine (where I created the certificate with makecert manually.

I initially tried to follow the same steps on the deployment server but failed as there was already a certificate with a common name of the server, so eve though the certificate generated when ever I tried to use the cert hash thumbprint of the newly generated certificate I was being given the :

SSL Certificate add failed, Error: 1312 A specified logon session does not exist...

The only way I could get the netsh http add to work was by specifying the cert hash of the existing certificate.

Is this my problem or a red herring? How do you debug issues like this?

Answer 1

Personally I just configure WCF tracing. It usually provides more user friendly info about a problem. Here's a how to link Configuring Tracing

Hope it helps!