I recently worked with Windows Azure Service Management REST API to programmatically use few groovy operations on hosted services like creating/ upgrading deployment, getting deployment status etc. These features need authenticated requests.
Authentication is done with certificates, which follows a three step process -
1. Create Certificate – using makecert utility or manually
2. Upload Certificate File(.cer) on Azure Portal
3. Attach Certificate with HTTP request – using .cer file or certificate thumbprint
The utility I created worked perfectly fine and one of my colleague also wanted to use it. I shared the executable and certificate (.cer file) with him. He installed the certificate and provided the thumbprint of the certificate to use the utility. When executed a request, it gave error “The remote server returned an error: (403) Forbidden”.
from Amol Gupta more here