It is such a simple and common requirement but it can be a nightmare to achieve out of the box with SharePoint. I spent quite a bit of time working out how a user can be authenticated via https and maintain their login cookie over http pages (without having to sign in again). More...

I recently needed a way to be able to deploy a web service project to different environments, where each environment was either using http or https to offer the web service to the multiple clients. If you find yourself in the same situation, then this technique might save you a bit of time.