I am developing an intranet application that contains a few connection strings in a database table with passwords (the previous developer did this - I know it is bad practice). The plan was to upgrade from SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008, so I was going to wait for this and then use TDE (Transparent Data Encryption) as no changes are required to code even when the data is encrypted.
I have now discovered that we are not upgrading to SQL Server 2008. What other options do I have to minimise changes required to the application? I thought of using the encryption facility in the web.config but I believe a lot of changes will be required. What other options do I have? There are two client applications that connect to it i.e. VB6 and VB.NT.