As always, I was wandering through the OM of our beloved SharePoint searching for getting to the Application Pools of a WebApplication. The case is that for our beloved LCM tool I was trying to get all the application pool accounts and add those to the LCM web as contributors.
Since I came across an issue regarding the fact that when a site or a web is deleted and you’ve checked ‘Log the deletions in SharePoint’ in the configuration page. The application pool accounts couldn’t get access to the “Deleted Sites” list on the LCM Web. (btw this is still an issue and is not solved by adding the accounts to the Web. This is due to the fact that the service accounts must be added as a farm admin to the Central Admin.. and we don’t want that either ;).
But to come back to the topic.. I’ve found an interesting class and that is the SPApplicationPool class. And.. well.. I was shocked to find out that there is a property called “Password”. Well actually I wasn’t shocked to found out that the property existed.. but I was shocked to find out that the property was not only settable but also gettable!!
So when running the following piece of code..
SPWebApplicationCollection webApplicationCollection = SPWebService.ContentService.WebApplications;
foreach (SPWebApplication webApplication in webApplicationCollection)
{
SPApplicationPool applicationPool = webApplication.ApplicationPool;
Console.WriteLine("WebApplication " + webApplication.Name);
Console.WriteLine("Username " + applicationPool.Username);
Console.WriteLine("Password " + applicationPool.Password);
}
..it will give you the passwords of each application pool account. Though I must say that this of course will only run if you logged in as a farm admin since this comes out of the SharePoint.Administration namespace. But I must say that this is quite tricky.. especially when there is another property in there called “SecurePassword”.
Please let me know your thoughts ;)
I’m going back to work on a different solution to store those damned deleted sites..