Summary

This chapter has covered two ways that ADSI and Active Directory present object data using properties, values, and data types. The property cache and IDirectoryObject interfaces are powerful features that can be used to manipulate the wide range of information and data types available in Active Directory. Personally, I prefer working with IADs and the property cache interfaces to using the IDirectoryObject interface. I'm biased towards COM technology, although I'm certain that many C++ and most C developers will feel more familiar with IDirectoryObject than with the "pure COM" interfaces.

In the next chapter, we tackle user interface issues and how to implement the user interface elements supplied by Active Directory.