Splash Screens are always helpful while starting the application. At the time of loading application code & data from backend, it is always good to show a splash screen to the end user. It actually gives a look & feel of loading something and that time the user will see the first UI on his desktop. In .Net 3.5 SP1, this is really simple. Just do the following to add a simple basic splash screen to your application.

1. Create a PNG image & add it to your project. PNG images are better choice rather than BMP images because, they are lighter in size and you can also create a transparent PNG image.

2. Now right click on that image & click properties from the solution explorer of Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

3. Here you will find an option named “Build Action”. Select “SplashScreen” from the dropdown.

4. Save the project, build it & run the application.

Now you will see the image (Splash Screen) before rendering the actual application. After completion of rendering of the main window, the Splash Screen will automatically close. This way, it improves the startup experience of the WPF application.

Microsoft provides a tool named “MakeCert.exe” which helps us to create a temporary SSL Certificate for development environment. This tool comes with Visual Studio & also with Windows SDK. If you installed Visual Studio, you can find it in this location: “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio <VERSION>\SmartDevices\SDK\SDKTools”. If you installed Windows SDK, you will get it here: “C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\<VERSION>\Bin”.

Now open Command Console (“cmd.exe”) & change your current directory to one of the location specified above. Type the following in Command Prompt & hit enter:

makecert -b 01/01/2009 -e 01/01/2020 -n "CN=Developers" -pe -r -sk "Microsoft Cryptographic Provider" -ss "Microsoft Cryptographic Store" c:\developerCertificate.cer

This will create a test certificate (valid from 01/01/2009 to 01/01/2020) named “developerCertificate.cer” in your ‘C’ drive, which you can use for development environment. You can change the validity period by changing the begindate (-b) & expirydate (-e). You can also change all the parameters specified above.

Here is the list of the parameters mentioned above: