SharePoint Tip – App.Config – More Secured Way to Have the config values

In most of the scenarios today we need to write some sort of Patch EXEs which nothing is but a console application.  In those console applications, obviously we need to have the app.config in which we will be writing the UserName and passwords.  When we do a Checkin of this code, the credentials got inserted in the git/tfs which is very dangerous.  And moreover, if we have more than one developer, all of them might be using their own usernames and passwords.  And if we have a version history on the git of the app.config, almost, I could get all the developers usernames and passwords.  The sample piece of code in app.config is as below.

 <appSettings>
     <add key="WebUrl" value="" />
     <add key="UserName" value="" />
     <add key="Password" value="" />
     <add key="Domain" value="" />
   </appSettings>
 

We will be consuming this from our C# code as below.

 var webUrl = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["WebUrl"];
                 var userName = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["UserName"];
                 var password = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["Password"];
                 var domain = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["Domain"];
 

To avoid this situation, we have an option.  On the appsettings tag, there is one more attribute called file as below.

 <appSettings file="c:myCredentialsApp.secrets.config">
     <add key="WebUrl" value="" />
     <add key="UserName" value="" />
     <add key="Password" value="" />
     <add key="Domain" value="" />
   </appSettings>
 

Now, we can create a file called “App.Secrets.Config” in the specified path and on that file, the tags are very simple and straight forward.

 <appSettings >
   <add key="WebUrl" value="https://google.com" />
   <add key="UserName" value="Sathish" />
   <add key="Password" value="Password" />
   <add key="Domain" value="sppals.com" />
 </appSettings>
 

Happy Coding,

Sathish Nadarajan.