>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.

What I received was a plain ASCII file by email stating that this is a certificate, but one that they handle on their end (the server side). So, instead of letting the server validates, they do it with their code. This is probably why I received an ASCII file. Maybe I am missing something here. But, I also believe regular IIS certificatew are also ASCII file. Aren't they?

The field in the database is Varchar(MAX) presently.