Examining the work of others is a perfectly valid means of learning how the 'gurus' and MVPs use best practices, patterns, and tricks to do things.
If you are learning and creating the application for an assignement just be sure to reference the url where you obtained the information.
If you are using it for commercial development, make sure that the license and copyright allow you to use and modify the code for your needs. There is nothing wrong building on free or open source code for either academic or commercial development. Just don't claim it as your own creation.
That being said, check out the Employee Information Toolkit at
http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/eisk[
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