Summary

In this chapter, I've shown how to use the properties and methods of the IADs interface to work with the attributes and values of directory objects. Active Directory and directory services are different from most databases in that each object might have a different set of attributes and, even if an attribute is allowed for an object class, it might not exist for the particular instance of that class. The IADs interface is supported on all directory objects and is the one you'll use the most when developing applications with Active Directory. I've also shown how to enumerate, create, and delete objects, which in Visual Basic is made very easy by ADSI.

In the next chapter, I'll provide more details about attributes and values, showing how to manipulate the local property cache and use IDirectoryObject, the lean-and-mean version of IADs.