The underlying connection was closed

For the past weeks I’ve used PowerShell to test REST APIs exposed over HTTPS. Everything was wonderful until I had to execute my script against a local instance of the service. My machine is not setup with proper certificates and PowerShell doesn’t see to like that. When ever I execute an Invoke-RestMethod command I get the following error message:

The underlying connection was closed: Could not establish trust relationship for the SSL/TLS secure channel

Looking around I was fortunate to find this one-liner that fixes everything!

[System.Net.ServicePointManager]::ServerCertificateValidationCallback = {$true}

By turning off certificate validation you are disabling security. Beware that this one-liner is a patch, and should not be used for anything else than development purposes.

Using PowerShell to Authenticate Against OAuth

From development to deployment, PowerShell is becoming the ‘go to’ automation technology on Microsoft Azure. So, I decided to use PowerShell to perform automated tests against a Web API (a.k.a REST service). These tests are built to run during the execution of a Continuous Release cycle and confirm that the API is responding as expected.