Windows certificate store

Question

Where can I find the windows certificate store location on the hard drive for server 2003. I am coding a c# utility for managing few certificates we use to notify when they are expiring. So, I choose to store them in the windows certificate store. Instead of using any existing location(Personal...) that I see in MMC I would like to create another location with my application name and a place(eg: 'c:\certs') of my choice, so that I can back up.

Solution 1

I strongly suspect that you don't need to create your own location. Do you have a good reason for wanting one? Windows has APIs to manage certificates, and I would suggest looking into those. I am pretty sure you can do all reasonable things though the public API. If you use the APIs with the system store, you will likely have to write less code, and your resulting solution will be more secure, better integrated with the OS (and all the OTHER tooling built for dealing with certs on windows)

Solution 2

I know this kind of old question, but when I was looking for an answer to the similar question, I was able to find that certificate information is stored in the windows registry, not in the regular files: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc787544(WS.10).aspx#w2k3tr_certs_tools_dgzz