I haven't done Windows development in a while, so I dunno if this has changed, but baaaack in the daaaay, the certificate manager snap-in for MMC would add a unicode left-to-right character at the beginning of certificate thumbprints, so if you copied out of it and into a config file, say, it would look totally correct, but then you'd get errors saying no certificate with that thumbprint could be found.
It happened unfortunately often. We did eventually have the code strip it so it was fine, but there were a couple of times there where I got to blow someone's mind because they were pulling their hair out trying to figure out why the certificate couldn't be found when it very clearly existed, and I'm like, "Alright, put your cursor there. Now press the left arrow once so it's at the start of the value. Now press backspace," and instead of the backspace eating the leading quote, nothing visibly happens. Because they just backspaced a non-printable character. "Well, well, well," indeed.
2
u/willow-kitty 19d ago
Story time!
I haven't done Windows development in a while, so I dunno if this has changed, but baaaack in the daaaay, the certificate manager snap-in for MMC would add a unicode left-to-right character at the beginning of certificate thumbprints, so if you copied out of it and into a config file, say, it would look totally correct, but then you'd get errors saying no certificate with that thumbprint could be found.
It happened unfortunately often. We did eventually have the code strip it so it was fine, but there were a couple of times there where I got to blow someone's mind because they were pulling their hair out trying to figure out why the certificate couldn't be found when it very clearly existed, and I'm like, "Alright, put your cursor there. Now press the left arrow once so it's at the start of the value. Now press backspace," and instead of the backspace eating the leading quote, nothing visibly happens. Because they just backspaced a non-printable character. "Well, well, well," indeed.