Impersonator

The term "Impersonation" in a programming context refers to a technique that executes the code under another user context than the user who originally started an application, i.e. the user context is temporarily changed once or multiple times during the execution of an application.

The reason for doing this is to perform tasks that the current user context of an application is not allowed to do. Of course you could grant the user executing an application more privileges, but usually this is a bad idea (due to security constraints) or impossible (e.g. if you don't have full administrative access to a machine to do so).

Using the code

To use the code, you simply construct the Impersonator class and pass the username, the domain and the password to the constructor. If you place an instance of the class inside a using-block, you need no further steps.

The following is a schematic example of how to use the class:

using ( new Impersonator( "myUsername", "myDomainname", "myPassword" ) )
{
...

...
}