How to find certificate by its thumbprint in C#

Question

I am using this code to find the certificate by its thumbprint. certificate exists in certificate manager in personal certificate store but this code is not finding that cer

Answer 1

The string literal containing your thumbprint has a left-to-right mark at the beginning. When MMC lists the certificate properties, it precedes the thumbprint value with this character so that the hex bytes are listed left to right even in locales where the text is normally rendered right to left.

Likely, this was a shortcut someone took because it was easier to prepend a character to one of the values in the property list than write a bit of code to dynamically update the edit control's style. Perhaps it was a quick fix to a bug report during localization testing.

In the MMC, the left-to-right mark has non-zero width, which you can observe by watching the cursor move when you arrow across it and my noticing that the first row of hex bytes is shifted slightly to the right compared to the second row.

In other editors such as Visual Studio, the left-to-right mark has no width, but you can still observe it by noticing that the cursor does not move when you arrow across is. As KenD answered, deleting this character solves the problem.

Quick way to identify the invisible character: Use the keyboard to select the invisible character; then paste it into Word between some normal characters. Select it in Word; then click Insert > Symbol > More Symbols. Look in the lower left under "Unicode name".