Advanced LDAP Searches

Beyond the Basics of Searching, System.DirectoryServices (SDS) exposes some powerful options to the developer. This chapter takes a look at the advanced options and demonstrates how and when to use them.

We start with some of the advanced behaviors that apply to many different kinds of searches, such as:

• Administrative limits
• Timeouts
• Performance optimization
• Global catalog searches in Active Directory
• Referral chasing

The second part of the chapter switches to the advanced searching features supported by Active Directory and ADAM that were introduced to SDS in version 2.0 of the .NET Framework. These include:

• Virtual List Views (VLVs)
• Deleted object searches
• Directory synchronization
• Attribute scope queries
• Extended distinguished name (DN) queries
• Security descriptor searches

We finish up with a discussion of asynchronous searches using the System.DirectoryServices.Protocols (SDS.P) namespace.