Security for Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET

Certificates and Signing

There’s nothing quite like packaged software. You walk into your local software mega-superstore, locate your favorite title—Microsoft Visual Basic .NET, for example—from an assortment of neatly arranged boxes, pull a box off the shelf and check out all the cool new features listed on it, take it to the counter, hand over your credit card, and it’s yours for the keeping. You lug the box home and install the software on your computer without a second thought. Why? Because you trust it. You have a good idea of what the software is going to do based on the slick marketing hype littering the box; you know who published the software—Microsoft, in this case; you assure yourself the hologram logo is legitimate and not conjured ...