After reading Christoph's post about a simple way to configure a domain account to access the database, I thought that I would give it a try. Of course if there is a way to break it, I will find it, but of course it will be unintentional. So first I go download the aspnet_setreg tool and stick it on my server. Next I follow all the steps listed in the article. Finally I try to hit my database from the application I'm working on. So what do I get?
Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately. Parser Error Message: Error reading the password from the registry.
So I go through all the steps again, change a few things, no dice. At first I thought that maybe I had to apply the hotfix to make this work, but then I read here that this fix was included in the 1.1 version of the framework. Finally I had an idea of something I should check. So I changed renamed the key in the registry from “MyApp.Web“ to simply “MyApp“. Bingo. Everything now works. Humph.
So if you decide to store your credentials in the registry like this, make sure you don't have a dot in your application name. Maybe this is the darkside to the power of the dot.