Find SPUser Preferred Name from UserPrincipal

Question

I am looping through a group of UserPrincipal that was retrieved from Active Directory. I need to get find a SPUser using the properties of the UserPrincipal. Once the SPUser is found I will get its UserProfile["PreferredName"].

I have tried passing all of the following to SPUser and the exception says user not found:

1. UserPrincipal.UserPrincipalName
2. UserPrincipal.DisplayName

I should also mention the reason I need to find the Preferred Name is because the UserPrincipal.DisplayName that I will eventually pass to a People Picker is resolving as the Preferred Name which I am afraid will mess us up later. I have already synced the Preferred Names, there are just a couple that are stuck as 'domain/username' instead of 'firstname lastname'.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

AD users don't exist on SharePoint until something causes SharePoint to know about them (e.g. an explicit permission setting, the user has logged in, etc).

Try using SPWeb.EnsureUser(string userlogonname) - it will create the user within SharePoint if it doesn't already exist, and return the SPUser object.