Performance Consulting: A Practical Guide for HR and Learning Professionals

Overview

A major (maybe the most important) feature that was introduced with Windows 2000 is the Active Directory . The Active Directory is a directory service, which provides a central, hierarchical store for user information, network resources, services, etc. It is also possible to extend the information in this directory service to store custom data that is of interest for the enterprise.

For example, Microsoft's Exchange Server 2000 uses the Active Directory intensively to store public folders and other items.

Before the Active Directory was available, the Exchange Server used its own private store for its objects. It was necessary for a system administrator to configure two user IDs for a single person: a user account in the Windows NT domain so that a logon was possible, and a user in the Exchange Directory. This was necessary because additional information for users was needed (such as e-mail addresses, phone numbers , and so on), and the user information for the NT domain was not extensible to let us put the required information in there. Now the system administrator only needs to configure a single user for a person in the Active Directory; the information for a user object can be extended so that it fits the requirements of the Exchange Server. We can also extend this information.

User information is stored in the Active Directory. Suppose we extend this information with a skills list. This way, it would easily be possible to track down a C# developer by searching for the required C# skill .

In this chapter, we will look at how we can use the .NET Framework to access and manipulate the data in a directory service using classes from the System.DirectoryServices namespace.

To use the examples in this chapter you need a Windows 2000 Server with the Active Directory installed and configured. The classes of the System.DirectoryServices namespace can also be used for Novell Directory Services and Windows NT 4, with small modifications to the code presented here.

In this chapter we will cover:

• The architecture of the Active Directory features and basic concepts

• Some of the tools available for administration of the Active Directory, and their benefit to programming

• How to read and modify data in the Active Directory

• Searching for objects in the Active Directory

• After discussing the architecture and how to program the Active Directory we are going to create a Windows application where we can specify properties and a filter to search for user objects