Get all members of an Active Directory group or local group

[chris128]

You can use this to find a list of all of the members of any group in AD. You will need to add a reference to System.DirectoryServices first though.

'Change the OU path and group name to suit your environment
Dim GroupDE As New DirectoryEntry("LDAP://CN=YourGroupName,OU=YourGroupsOU,DC=yourdomainname,DC=com")
 
Dim Members As Object = GroupDE.Invoke("Members", Nothing) '<<< Get members
For Each Member As Object In CType(Members, IEnumerable)  '<<< loop through members
  Dim CurrentMember As New DirectoryEntry(Member) '<<< Get directoryentry for user
  MessageBox.Show(CurrentMember.Name.Remove(0, 3))  '<<< Show each user's name in a messagebox
Next 
 
'NOTE: You should also dispose of each DirectoryEntry that you use, either by using the Dispose method or by using a "Using" statement. I haven't included this in my example above just to keep it short and to the point.

As you can see in my example, I am just displaying all of the members names in a messagebox but if you want to get different attributes instead of just the name then remove that line and use the DirectoryEntry object for each member to get whatever attributes you want

Note that you can also get group members by using the "members" attribute of a group (e.g cast GroupDE.Properties("members").Value to an array of strings and each string will be the full LDAP path to each member so you can then bind a new DirectoryEntry to that path) but I believe there are some slight differences in the way that this works when compared to just invoking the Members method (like I do in the code example above).

Hope it helps someone out

Chris