SharePoint 2010 and Application Pool Passwords

If by any chance you ran across the need to recover the Application Pool Password(s) in either WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007, they were stored in an unsecure and clear text fashion. Like illustrated nicely in the listed blog postings below:

1. http://www.zimmergren.net/archive/2009/05/18/recoverfetch-the-application-pool-password.aspx
2. http://bloggingabout.net/blogs/bas/archive/2009/05/28/applicationpool-password-stored-as-plain-text-withing-sharepoint.aspx

That has changed in SharePoint Foundation 2010 and SharePoint 2010, the methods in the Object Model have been deprecated. Furthermore, when they are called you receive an error which leads to have to handle it correctly.

That certainly is a step forward to securing the Application Pool Passwords.