I am building a Sharepoint web part that will be used by all users. The web part connects to a web service which needs credentials with higher privileges than common users. I hard coded credentials in the web part's code.

query.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential("username", "password", "domain");

query is an instance of the web service class

This may not be a good approach. In regard with security, source code of the web apart is available to people who are not allowed to see the credential. This is bad enough, But is there any other drawback of this approach?

A web part doesn't have a .config file associated. The .config file is in application-level of the sharepoint site, and I don't want to modify it for a single webpart. I wonder if there is a webpart-specific way to solve this problem? Say provide a WebBrowsable property to an admin so that he/she can set credentials. Is this possible?

Thanks