Continuing the story about new release I will talk about two interesting features.

Set-CertificateExtension

Windows CA supports extension addition to a certificate request. Sometimes it is necessary. For example, IIS admin submitted certificate request for one of the web site. He used IIS Manager console to generate request. The biggest drawback of the IIS certificate request manager – it doesn’t allow you to specify subject alternative names (SAN). Or another example, some application requires custom extension which cannot be added through Certificate Templates console. Or, maybe, certificate request contains some unwanted extensions and you want to disable them. Set-CertificateExtension command will be very handy in such situations.

I was silent for about 3 months or so. There was no interesting topics to discuss and I hardly worked on my public projects, including PowerShell PKI module, PS Cmdlet Help Editor and ASN.1 Editor (not yet public). Today I completed new PS PKI module release and there is something to talk about.

New milestone

Hellya! We reached 2000 downloads in 6 months! I think, it is a good progress! :)

As promised, there was a need to move forward and use some more efficient tools. As the result, my underlying API library was migrated to .NET Framework 4.0. There are no plans to move to 4.5, so you can be safe about this. For some time. Windows PowerShell 2.0 do not support CLR 4.0 assemblies, therefore, Windows PowerShell 2.0 is out of support. Although, PowerShell scripts are written in PS v2.0 and do not use any features of new languages, I don’t think, it will be a big problem. Minimum supported PowerShell version is 3.0.

Recently I faced an interesting issue with unmanaged structure definitions that contains unions. Unions allow one portion of memory to be accessed as different data types. Here is a CERT_ID structure definition in C++ that uses an anonymous union (exact my issue):

Hello everyone, I’m glad to present another release of PS Cmdlet Help Editor! New version (3.0) brings big changes in it’s functionality. Key changes in this release:

• Introduced Start Page;
• Introduced PS Help project file which stores help content and other settings;
• Introduced basic BB-code support (in future, BB-code support will be enhanced);
• Introduced an ability to publish help content online via MetaWeblog API.

Today I released SSL Certificate Verifier tool to CodePlex. There are plans to enhance the tool (as per customer requests), so I decided to publish it online, rather than maintaining it here.

>> SSL Certificate Verifier <<