The Microsoft® Certificate Enrollment Control (CEC) is provided for corporate developers and independent software vendors (ISVs) who want to write custom modules and applications that must request a certificate be issued to the named user (subject). This guide documents the CEC's design and explains how to write applications incorporating it.
Portions of the following material assume that the reader has a basic familiarity with public-key cryptography, digital certificates, PKCS #7 and PKCS #10 standards, and how certificate stores are used in the Microsoft CryptoAPI. Readers who are new to these topics should read the PKCS standards that are available at http://www.rsa.com, and the CryptoAPI Programmers Guide and Reference, available in the Microsoft Platform SDK, before proceeding.