local user name disallowed chars

Question

currently if I try to add local user "jim,bob" to a Windows 7 system, as expected, the following error dialog is shown displaying all the illegal chars for a user name. Is there a quick .net method to call which returns the same chars? E.g.

Path.GetInvalidPathChars();

returns all the invalid path chars. Is there a similar method out there for user names?

Answer 1

Path.GetInvalidFileNameChars() - ?

User Name Policies from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc722458.aspx

A key policy you'll need to set is the naming scheme for accounts. In Windows NT, user names must follow these rules:

Local user names must be unique on a workstation.

Global user names must be unique throughout a domain.

User names must be no more than 20 characters in length.

User names cannot contain certain characters. Invalid characters include:

" / \ [ ] : ; | = , + * ? < >

User names can contain all other special characters, including spaces, periods, dashes, and underscores. But it's generally not a good idea to use spaces in account names. On some non-Windows NT systems, such as UNIX, spaces aren't valid in user names and the user may have difficulty accessing these systems.

Answer 2

What you need is this:

Path.GetInvalidFileNameChars()

Look at this for more details: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.path.getinvalidfilenamechars.aspx