If you make use of the My.User object in a WinForms application, you can just dive right into it and start using it right away, however, if you add this to a new console app it returns a blank response for My.User.Name: Console.WriteLine("User: {0}", My.User.Name) Console.ReadLine() And you'll see this when you run it: To get around this problem, all it takes is an initialization that gets called automagically in WinForms: My.User.InitializeWithWindo... Put that before you use the object for...