For simple preferences you could use a combination of
Application.UserAppDataPath
..UserAppDataRegistry
..CommonAppDataPath
..CommonAppDataRegistry
Not sure how to do it off the top of my head, but I'm sure if you just
needed to check for admin rights to the computer you could make a quick
check to the current identity.
Are you looking for something complex like LDAP or just authentication
against a database? If you just need to authenticate the one
application (i.e. one computer, one set of security settings), you
could imbed SQLite and create a small security/preference system that
gets installed with the application.
http://www.sqlite.org/. For the
..net ADO wrapper go to
http://adodotnetsqlite.sourceforge.net/. The
SQLite documentation has a link for a wrapper that works with .net 2.0
If your not going to tie things down using microsoft security I'd
suggest just creating your own classes and using a hash to protect the
password. Encode the password as an MD5 hash in the database. When the
user types the password, just MD5 the string and send the MD5 for
comparison. This is totally breakable but at least protects the
password from being read by a human. In the case of SQLite everything
is executed in the current security so nobody could sniff the
communicaitons. A simple class library with groups, users and
permissions is pretty easy to implement.
Not sure why you don't want to use Identities? I linked ASP.Net forms
to a GenericIdentity and created a data access layer for authentication
against a database. Was able to swap out Sybase SQL Anywhere for SQL
Server relatively painlessly.
Cheers
Russ
