Programmatically encrypting a config-file in .NET

Question

Could somebody please do a rundown of how to programmatically encrypt a config-file in .NET, preferably in C#.

What I would like to do is do some kind of check on an

Answer 1

@TK: a hashing algo can only be 'guessed', not reverse engineered. One can only reconstruct the input to a hash value by completely guessing the input (apart from collisions, that is) This can be done by a rainbow crack for example (see an implementation of a rainbow cracker here)

I would say that a 3rd party encryption tool is not safer than the .NET framework encryption algorithms, these libraries just help you doing your job faster