Can you provide some more details that what else you wanna do? X509Certificate class is used to read a certificate like: X509Certificate cert = X509Certificate.CreateFromCertFile(PathToCertificate); If you have a certificate file with extension .cer you can read it's contents through the object of X509Certificate. MakeCert is a utility with .Net Framework to create a Certificate. There are other encryption libraries available that you can use to provide a private/public key pair for creating your certificate....? Whereas the X509Store is used to manage the certificates... Muhammad Talha