How can I get a list of users from active directory?

How can I get a list of users from active directory? Is there a way to pull username, firstname, lastname? I saw a similar post where this was used:

 PrincipalContext ctx = new PrincipalContext(ContextType.Domain, "YOURDOMAIN");

I have never done anything with active directory so I am completely lost. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

If you are new to Active Directory, I suggest you should understand how Active Directory stores data first.

Active Directory is actually a LDAP server. Objects stored in LDAP server are stored hierarchically. It's very similar to you store your files in your file system. That's why it got the name Directory server and Active Directory

The containers and objects on Active Directory can be specified by a distinguished name. The distinguished name is like this CN=SomeName,CN=SomeDirectory,DC=yourdomain,DC=com. Like a traditional relational database, you can run query against a LDAP server. It's called LDAP query.

There are a number of ways to run a LDAP query in .NET. You can use DirectorySearcher from System.DirectoryServices or SearchRequest from System.DirectoryServices.Protocol.

For your question, since you are asking to find user principal object specifically, I think the most intuitive way is to use PrincipalSearcher from System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement. You can easily find a lot of different examples from google. Here is a sample that is doing exactly what you are asking for.

using (var context = new PrincipalContext(ContextType.Domain, "yourdomain.com"))
{
    using (var searcher = new PrincipalSearcher(new UserPrincipal(context)))
    {
        foreach (var result in searcher.FindAll())
        {
            DirectoryEntry de = result.GetUnderlyingObject() as DirectoryEntry;
            Console.WriteLine("First Name: " + de.Properties["givenName"].Value);
            Console.WriteLine("Last Name : " + de.Properties["sn"].Value);
            Console.WriteLine("SAM account name   : " + de.Properties["samAccountName"].Value);
            Console.WriteLine("User principal name: " + de.Properties["userPrincipalName"].Value);
            Console.WriteLine();
        }
    }
}
Console.ReadLine();

Note that on the AD user object, there are a number of attributes. In particular, givenName will give you the First Name and sn will give you the Last Name. About the user name. I think you meant the user logon name. Note that there are two logon names on AD user object. One is samAccountName, which is also known as pre-Windows 2000 user logon name. userPrincipalName is generally used after Windows 2000.

If you want to filter y active accounts add this to Harvey's code:

 UserPrincipal userPrin = new UserPrincipal(context);
 userPrin.Enabled = true;

after the first using. Then add

  searcher.QueryFilter = userPrin;

before the find all. And that should get you the active ones.

PrincipalContext for browsing the AD is ridiculously slow (only use it for .ValidateCredentials, see below), use DirectoryEntry instead and .PropertiesToLoad() so you only pay for what you need.

Filters and syntax here: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/5392.active-directory-ldap-syntax-filters.aspx

Attributes here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/adschema/attributes-all

using (var root = new DirectoryEntry($"LDAP://{Domain}"))
{
    using (var searcher = new DirectorySearcher(root))
    {
        // looking for a specific user
        searcher.Filter = $"(&(objectCategory=person)(objectClass=user)(sAMAccountName={username}))";
        // I only care about what groups the user is a memberOf
        searcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add("memberOf");

        // FYI, non-null results means the user was found
        var results = searcher.FindOne();

        var properties = results?.Properties;
        if (properties?.Contains("memberOf") == true)
        {
            // ... iterate over all the groups the user is a member of
        }
    }
}

Clean, simple, fast. No magic, no half-documented calls to .RefreshCache to grab the tokenGroups or to .Bind or .NativeObject in a try/catch to validate credentials.

For authenticating the user:

using (var context = new PrincipalContext(ContextType.Domain))
{
    return context.ValidateCredentials(username, password);
}

Include the System.DirectoryServices.dll, then use the code below:

DirectoryEntry directoryEntry = new DirectoryEntry("WinNT://" + Environment.MachineName);
string userNames="Users: ";

foreach (DirectoryEntry child in directoryEntry.Children)
{
    if (child.SchemaClassName == "User")
    {
        userNames += child.Name + Environment.NewLine   ;         
    }
    
}
MessageBox.Show(userNames);

Certainly the credit goes to @Harvey Kwok here, but I just wanted to add this example because in my case I wanted to get an actual List of UserPrincipals. It's probably more efficient to filter this query upfront, but in my small environment, it's just easier to pull everything and then filter as needed later from my list.

Depending on what you need, you may not need to cast to DirectoryEntry, but some properties are not available from UserPrincipal.

using (var searcher = new PrincipalSearcher(new UserPrincipal(new PrincipalContext(ContextType.Domain, Environment.UserDomainName))))
{
	List<UserPrincipal> users = searcher.FindAll().Select(u => (UserPrincipal)u).ToList();
    foreach(var u in users)
        {
            DirectoryEntry d = (DirectoryEntry)u.GetUnderlyingObject();
			Console.WriteLine(d.Properties["GivenName"]?.Value?.ToString() + d.Properties["sn"]?.Value?.ToString());
        }
}