A Guided Garden Stroll through the .NET Framework Class Library

Namespace: SYSTEM.DIRECTORYSERVICES

● I am the DirectoryServices Namespace. My most famous classes are DirectorySearcher and DirectoryEntry.

I encapsulate all of the Active Directory Services Interface (ADSI) technology into an easy to use object model.

What can you do with me? Well, if you use either the WinNT service provider, LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), Novell Netware Directory Service (NDS), or Novell Netware 3 service (NWCOMPAT), you can examine, edit, insert, and maintain; users, printers and other system entities in your network’s Active Directory database.

My most popular component is the DirectorySearcher. With DirectorySearcher, you easily identify the user who is currently logged into your business application by retrieving their name, department, phone number, e-mail address; anything that’s stored in your Active Directory about users. You do this by:

• First: Create a new DirectoryEntry object and supply it your Active Directory’s root path.
• Second: Create a new DirectorySearcher and supply it with the DirectoryEntry object you created in the first step.
• Third: Set the DirectorySearcher.Filter property with the UserID you are looking up.
• Fourth: Loop through your DirectorySearcher.FindAll method which returns a SearchResult.Properties collection in a SearchResult object. The SearchResult.Properties collection contains all the information about the User node that it found in ActiveDirectory.

And I do all this in .NET managed code.