User Information List

The other day I was trying to create a list event receiver that would fire when a user was added to SharePoint. I did some research and found the User Information List, which is the list that contains all the users in SharePoint. You access this list when you click on the People and Groups link. I built the event receiver and attached it to the list and added some users, only to find out that the event was not firing.

I did some debugging and the code was working fine, so I decided to attach the event receiver to another custom list and added some items to that. The event receiver fired perfectly. I used the U2U CAML Query Builder to run some queries against the User Information List and was able to get back the type of data I wanted in my event receiver.

I tried to do some more research and could not find anyone else out there that was trying to do the same thing as me and so I came to the conclusion that there is some special setting on the User Information List that does not allow the events to fire. I will keep this on the list of items to watch out for and if anyone has any ideas feel free to let me know.