Creating local user account c# and .NET 2.0

Question

How can I create a local user account using .NET 2.0 and c# and also be able to set the \"Password never expires\" to never.

I have tried using \"Net.exe\" using Pr

Answer 1

This code will create a local account with the password never expires option set:

        using System.DirectoryServices;

        DirectoryEntry hostMachineDirectory = new DirectoryEntry("WinNT://localhost");
        DirectoryEntries entries = hostMachineDirectory.Children;
        bool userExists = false;
        foreach (DirectoryEntry each in entries)
        {
            userExists = each.Name.Equals("NewUser",  
            StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase);
            if (systemtestUserExists)
                break;
        }

        if (false == userExists)
        {
            DirectoryEntry obUser = entries.Add("NewUser", "User");
            obUser.Properties["FullName"].Add("Local user");
            obUser.Invoke("SetPassword", "abcdefg12345@");
            obUser.Invoke("Put", new object[] {"UserFlags", 0x10000});
            obUser.CommitChanges();
        }

The 0x10000 flag means PasswordNeverExpires.

I spent a long time figuring out how to create a local user account with the password set not to expire. It seems that when you try to use:

int val = (int)newUser.Properties["userAccountControl"].Value; 
newUser.Properties["userAccountControl"].Value = val | 0x10000

permissions from active directory come into play. If you have active directory permissions everything works fine. If you don't then getting the userAccountControl property will always result in a null value. Trying to set userAccountControl will result in an exception "The directory property cannot be found in the cache".

However after much hunting around I found another property "UserFlags" that needs to be set using Invoke. You can use this to set the flag on a local account. I've tried this code and it worked on windows server 2008.

Hope this helps