About a month ago, we had a problem migrating an old BizTalk application from the development environment to the quality environment. This application signs the incoming messages, based on the certificate installed on the machine, and puts this signature in one record in the body of the message; all of this is executed in the received pipeline. The certificate is loaded based on the thumbprint.
When we attempted to test the application, we got the following error:
“Cannot find a local machine certificate with the thumbprint: 5693ae76acfe33325bd6e1f05f38a9941892cb69 cannot be found.”
Because this was an old application and lacked documentation, our problem was knowing what and where the certificate was installed.
📝 One-Minute Brief
Managing certificates for BizTalk encryption and signing is often a manual, error-prone task. This post demonstrates how to leverage PowerShell to interact with the Windows Certificate Store directly. By using the Cert: drive provider, you can easily list, find, and validate certificates required for BizTalk Host Instances and pipelines, enabling faster troubleshooting and automated environment setup.
Using MMC (Microsoft Management Console), we can see all the certificates installed on the machine, but we cannot search by thumbprint!!! 🙁
So I asked my friend José António Silva to show me the power of PowerShell to solve my annoying problem:
Solution 1
gci cert:\* -Recurse | ?{$_.Thumbprint -eq "5693ae76acfe33325bd6e1f05f38a9941892cb69"} | select Subject, PSPath}
The result will be something like this:
Subject PSPath
——- ——
O=”… S A “, C=PT, CN=… SA Microsoft.PowerShell.Security\Certificate::CurrentUser\R…
O=”… S A “, C=PT, CN=… SA Microsoft.PowerShell.Security\Certificate::LocalMachine\…
O=”… S A “, C=PT, CN=… SA Microsoft.PowerShell.Security\Certificate::LocalMachine\…
Solution 2
gci cert:\* -Recurse | ?{$_.Thumbprint -eq "5693ae76acfe33325bd6e1f05f38a9941892cb69"} | select PSParentPath
Where this time the result will be a little simpler:
PSParentPath
————
Microsoft.PowerShell.Security\Certificate::CurrentUser\Root
Microsoft.PowerShell.Security\Certificate::LocalMachine\My
Microsoft.PowerShell.Security\Certificate::LocalMachine\Root
So now I know where the certificate is installed, and what certificate I should install in a quality environment.
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THESE POWERSHELL SCRIPTS ARE PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND.
You can download Check where a specific certificate is installed with PowerShell from GitHub here:
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