When faced with learning a new technology, I generally want to know the process for working with it. What's the first step I have to take? What's the next? Often times, programming books and software development kits throw a bunch of information together in a seemingly random order, and not until you understand the whole do you know what specific steps to take to be productive.
The process for working with Active Directory is straightforward. Let's say you are creating an application to look up a person's telephone number in the directory and possibly change some personal information. Here is a sketch of the steps that application would follow (the terms that Active Directory and ADSI use are shown in bold).
That covers the majority of the work with Active Directory, but of course, that's not all. I left out some things that applications tend to require because this example is so simple. Here are the other operations that are typically performed with Active Directory:
In the following sections, I'll focus on binding to the directory. In the next chapter, I'll cover searching. In Chapter 6, I'll cover how to access directory data and modify it, enumerate directory objects, and add and delete directory objects. In Chapter 7, I'll talk about how to retrieve data without knowing property names. In Chapter 9, I'll cover how to extend Active Directory with new classes and objects.