Are you sure the value in the DB is a string? If it's a certificate it should be an Image field and return byte[] (or a stream) that you can use as input to the cert constructor.

Certificate data is always binary, so if it's a string you'd have to turn it back into its raw binary form using the Encode class.

+++ Rick ---

>>Where did the string come from ?
>
>I do a select and it goes into a datarow such as:
>
>loRow("CertificateFieldHere")
>
>Then, from this, I would like to be able to pass it directly to the X509Certificate.CreateFromCertFile() method. The goal is then to avoid dumping into the disk and pass a file.