Introduction to LDAP and Active Directory

This chapter describes the fundamental underpinnings of the material in the rest of the book. Since this book is essentially about programming directory services using the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) with Microsoft's .NET platform, we introduce the basic concepts of LDAP directories and protocols here.

The first part of the chapter introduces directory services and some specific directory technologies. The second part is more technical and delves into some of the details concerning the LDAP specification itself.