I have searched around before posting...

First off, I am new to encryption and am just playing around with encrypting. I am using the code from the following link. Basically I am using the built in functions in visual basic for encryption (Cryptography). Seeing as there is a lot of code for it, I posted a link to the code I am using.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/301070

I get what this is doing and how it is doing it...for the most part. My question is how do you let the user set the key to be used instead of it randomly generating one? One of the reasons I want this over the random key is that the user will be able to remember it easier and the key generated sometimes has weird characters in it that not everyone will no how to use. I have tried everything I can think of.

The encryption works good, all I am using it for is to encrypt/decrypt a text document. If this is not too good of an encryption, that does not matter as I am not using it to encrypt any highly sensitive information. All I need is a way to be able to allow the user to set the key, but every time I try to pass a string through the encryption() method instead of a generated key (in the generateKey() method) it will give me an error.

I hope this makes sense, all I need is to allow the user to enter their own key and am not sure how to achieve this.

Thanks in advance for your help.