How to prevent reverse engineering of VB.NET apps

[wildfire1982]

Heres a quick question for you all. Im just moving from vb6 to .net and one of you mentioned earlier about storing sensitive informations like passwords in the exe. Say i was to log into a remote database, where would you all suggest to keep the passwords\urls\usernames etc? Somewhere encrypted but you really wouldnt want to have to code a completely new section just to store the details whereas in older versions of vb it was more safe to just use it in the exe. Any thoughts?

 

[AlexCode]

I think the safer way its to store it in an SQL Server database...

 

[PlausiblyDamp]

Was never that safe to store them direct in the EXE in older versions of VB (or in an EXE from any language) without doing something to hide them.
Also it is a lot more secure to store a hash of the password rather than an encrypted version - with encryption there is always a small chance it could be recovered.