UserPrincipal from Active Directory

Question

I have problem with getting UserPrincipal from Active Directory. First of all I have used on my local environment (using not IIS but ASP.NET development Server):

User usr = new User();
usr.SoeId = Request.ServerVariables["LOGON_USER"];
usr.IP = Request.ServerVariables["REMOTE_ADDR"];
usr.FirstName = UserPrincipal.Current.GivenName;
usr.LastName = UserPrincipal.Current.Surname;

And it works fine. I got what I want. But when I install application on testing environment I got error "Object reference not set to an instance of an object". I have tried solution from here.

using (PrincipalContext pc = new PrincipalContext(ContextType.Domain))
{
    UserPrincipal up = UserPrincipal.FindByIdentity(pc, usr.SoeId);
    return up.DisplayName;
    // or return up.GivenName + " " + up.Surname;
}

But it does not work.

I use windows authentication. Impersonation is set to true. Please help me.

Answer 1

change the identity of your ApplicationPool to run using domain user.

in iis 6 right-click your application pool, go to Identity tab and set a domain user under which the pool will run.

in iis 7 right-click your application pool, select advance settings, under process model you'll find Identity, change it to use domain user.

you can also pass a domain user and pass to PrincipalContest Constructor

using (PrincipalContext context = new PrincipalContext(
                                    ContextType.Domain,
                                    "name of your domain",
                                    "container of your domain",
                                    "user@domain", //create a user in domain for context creation purpose.. this username will be constant.. you can keep it in app config
                                    "password")){
    UserPrincipal up = UserPrincipal.FindByIdentity(pc, usr.SoeId);
    return up.DisplayName;
}

if your domain name is dom.com then your container would be something like DC=dom,DC=com and the user name should be given as [email protected] or dom\user