how to setup IIS over secure communications - HTTPS/SSL?

To change websites hosted over IIS onto HTTPS/SSL we want to do this from IIS
- Obtain a server certificate.
- Specify the server certificate to a default web site in IIS.

The sever certificate could be obtained by any third party CA (credential authority) like Verisign that authenticates your web server. However, for reasons of test or with limited resources/pages access you may not want to reach out to them. In that case, the easiest way is to get an SSL from SelfSSL.exe that comes bundled with IIS resources toolkit 6.0 available from Microsoft for free!

The toolkit includes bring along many other tools but you can select only SelfSSL.exe by itself.
This is a commmand line utility which you can just execute it and say "Yes" when prompted to override any server certificate existing.

Test it by accessing https://localhost... and it should load fine.
Also, ideally this certificate be installed in your local Directory store to have IIS recognize it valid. This is applicable to IIS 5.0, 5.1 and 6.0

HTH, Thanks - Dipesh