During my daily work I quite often find an article which highlights interesting things which I would like to share with you on my blog in the Picks of the week category.

Here are the picks for this week:

• Consuming Webservices over HTTPS (SSL)
  SSL can be used for different things, e.g. Server authentication and encryption. In some situation you only need the encryption part and server authentication is not required which means you might want to use an untrusted or self-signed certificate. In a browser you can bypass the certificate warning but that will not work with programs consuming a web service. This article explains how to code your application to access a web service on a server which uses an untrusted certificate.
   
• Reset the Farm Passphrase
  The Farm passphrase prevents unauthorized users from adding new servers to a farm. But what if you forgot the passphrase or the person who created the farm in the past has left the company and forgot to document it? This article explains how to reset the passphrase without a need to recreate the whole farm.
   
• SharePoint 2010 Managed Metadata
• A great article series written by Andrew Connell covering various different aspects of the managed metadata functionality in SharePoint 2010
   
• When Page Output Caching Does Not Output
  Nice article with background information on SharePoint Output Caching and common problems which might prevent it from working properly
   
• Database maintenance for SharePoint Server 2010
  Learn how to maintain the databases that host data and configuration settings for Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Products. Read guidelines and study examples of the recommended database maintenance strategies and task
   
• “Headless” Authentication with SharePoint Online and the Client Side Object Model
  This provides an detailed view on how to tackle the challenges when creating application which are interacting with SharePoint online webservices.