Bypass invalid SSL certificate errors when calling web services in .Net

Question

We are setting up a new SharePoint for which we don't have a valid SSL certificate yet. I would like to call the Lists web service on it to retrieve some meta data about the setup. However, when I try to do this, I get the exception:

The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel.

The nested exception contains the error message:

The remote certificate is invalid according to the validation procedure.

This is correct since we are using a temporary certificate.

My question is: how can I tell the .Net web service client (SoapHttpClientProtocol) to ignore these errors?

Answer 1

Alternatively you can register a call back delegate which ignores the certification error:

...
ServicePointManager.ServerCertificateValidationCallback = MyCertHandler;
...

static bool MyCertHandler(object sender, X509Certificate certificate, X509Chain chain, SslPolicyErrors error)
{
// Ignore errors
return true;
}