Journey to robust web services: kick starting use of credentials and certificates for message security, phase I

As any sensible developer of a large scale system knows, security is paramount. Therefore, encryption of sensitive data is an absolute must, encryption of all data is recommended, depending on the field in which you're working. Encryption with WCF is baked in, and is relatively straight forward to setup, though there are a number of important details to which attention must be paid. The steps are somewhat different depending on whether you're using IIS or a self-hosted service (e.g. in a Windows Service).

If you're using a Windows Service, you'll need to perform the following steps to get started:

1. Generate a self-signed certificate (which can be done in the Windows Control Panel)
2. Configure the port to which you're binding the service with the certificate you've just generated, according to this MSDN article. 
3. [to be continued]

If you're using IIS, getting started in a development environment is somewhat simpler.

1. Generate a self signed certificate with IIS. In most cases, IIS will have a developer certificate already installed that you can use.
2. Retrieve the thumbprint of the certificate. You'll need this in order for your application to be able to find it at runtime. WARNING: Don't just copy the thumbprint out of the certificate properties window in IIS, because there are non-printing characters in the text control that will cause you problems when you try to paste the thumbprint into your Web.config file. Write them out by hand.
3. There are two methods you can take for making the certificate available to your WCF service:
1. Follow the guide here if you want to make the certificate available to your application by code.
2. Use the information on this page to create a element underneath a configuration/system.serviceModel/behaviors/behavior/serviceCredentials element.