I have so far done the following: - Generated certificate and private key as .pem, also cat'd them together. Successfully connected to gateway.sandbox.push.apple.com. - Using the provisional profile with push notifications is enabled for development, I have a basic app that successfully prompted "Do you want to allow push notifications", so this is working correctly - Obtained the device token - I have tried pulling a few pre-made files for SSLing into sandbox from the internet just to see if I can get them running before I start development.
The files are the php file posted here: http://www.raywenderlich.com/3443/apple-push-notification-services-tutorial-part-12. I actually got a "Message successfully sent"
The python file posted here: Apple PNS (push notification services) sample code; I had to edit the Python 3 command "fromhash" line to str(float.fromhash(...))
I also tried using the PyAPNs API: https://github.com/simonwhitaker/PyAPNs. I still have use_sandbox set to true.
Obviously I changed the device tokens and public keys/certificates to my own. Sadly I have not received any pushed notifications yet, and I'm not receiving any concrete errors to tell me why. If anyone can shed some light, that would be amazing.
From my comment in radesix's answer, and apologies that I can provide no more detail as it's been a year since I've touched iOS development.
The problem was my provisional profile had the "aps-environment" key set to developer, but for some reason xcode defaulted to "debug". Changing this in the editor solved my problem.