The Light at the End of the Tunnel

I finally finished SSL, and I figured out why I originally thrashed around it.

Basically, I'm a top-down kind of developer.

If I designed a house, I'd consider what its requirements are (2 people, 6 computers, and 3 cats), and turn that into specifications (four bedrooms, one computer room, six litterboxes), and the specifications into a design (the litterboxes do NOT go in my office).

The SSL project, as presented, was more of a bottom-up problem -- how do you plumb this weird thing into an existing foundation? This took me out of my normal thinking "how should this work?" mode and left me poking at the edges. Once I sat back and decided I needed a proper interface to the new SSL code, that gave me a "top" to drill down from and then plug into the existing environment.

Of course, then I had to work six days a week for three weeks and be left wondering about a weird bug with PFXImportCertStore not working in a GUI program on Windows XP (it does work from a command line program, on other versions of Windows, or if I run it under a program debugger!), but that's programming for you.