Well, I had a hair pulling session trying to recover the passwords on this site. Both my admin and host paswords got hosed, so I couldn't just login and fix them.

I first went Googling to find a winform app to help with this problem. Well, all the solutions were just modules to install on your DotNetNuke installation. Since I can't even login as host, this approach is just totally useless. Thankfully, DNN uses the ASP.NET 2.0 Membership Providers.

So, I started with Membership.Provider.RetrievePassword(). Oops, "Bad Data". Crap! I tried other account passwords with the same result. Double-Crap! I modified my little winform app, to now reset passwords. This time I used Membership.Provider.ResetPassword(). Got a new password for host, and I was able to login now. YES! I'm using .NET 2.0 for this winform app.

So if you want to get this working, here is what you need to do:

Make sure that you include the following sections from your DNN's website web.config file:

• connectionStrings
• system.web

You only need the membership and machinekeys sections inside system.web.

Import System.Configuration and System.Web into your project. All of the needed API calls will be under Membership.Provider namespace. You'll find a lot of samples on how to use on Google.