.net - Determining members of local groups via C#

Question

I wondered whether anybody knows how to obtain membership of local groups on a remote server programmatically via C#. Would this require administrator permissions? And if so is there any way to confirm the currently logged in user's membership (or not) of these groups?

Answer 1

Howto: (Almost) Everything In Active Directory via C# is very helpfull and also includes instructions on how to iterate AD members in a group.

public ArrayList Groups(string userDn, bool recursive)
{
    ArrayList groupMemberships = new ArrayList();
    return AttributeValuesMultiString("memberOf", userDn,
        groupMemberships, recursive);
}

You will also need this function:

public ArrayList AttributeValuesMultiString(string attributeName,
     string objectDn, ArrayList valuesCollection, bool recursive)
{
    DirectoryEntry ent = new DirectoryEntry(objectDn);
    PropertyValueCollection ValueCollection = ent.Properties[attributeName];
    IEnumerator en = ValueCollection.GetEnumerator();

    while (en.MoveNext())
    {
        if (en.Current != null)
        {
            if (!valuesCollection.Contains(en.Current.ToString()))
            {
                valuesCollection.Add(en.Current.ToString());
                if (recursive)
                {
                    AttributeValuesMultiString(attributeName, "LDAP://" +
                    en.Current.ToString(), valuesCollection, true);
                }
            }
        }
    }
    ent.Close();
    ent.Dispose();
    return valuesCollection;
}

If you do now want to use this AD-method, you could use the info in this article, but it uses unmanaged code:

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/groupandmembers.aspx

The sample application that they made: