What This Book Covers

Active Directory and its primary programming interface, Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI), is such a large topic that writing a comprehensive book would require years, and it would take up a good portion of your bookshelf. Instead of being a comprehensive A to Z reference, this book focuses on what developers need to know to get up and running quickly. Throughout the book, I provide complete samples that can be used in your own applications. All the samples are written with a style that is easy to understand and are clearly commented.

This book is broken down into three parts. In Part I, "Overview of Active Directory" (Chapters 1 through 3), I provide background that I think is helpful before starting an in-depth discussion of Active Directory. I provide some historical overview of directory services; walk through the basic architecture of Active Directory, pointing out important concepts for developers; and then describe the fundamentals of the programming interfaces you use to communicate with Active Directory—both LDAP and ADSI.

In Part II, "Programming with Active Directory" (Chapters 4 through 8), I describe how to find and use information stored in Active Directory using ADSI and C++, Visual Basic, and VBScript. I describe common tasks faced by developers and administrators and show sample code that you can use to perform these tasks and solve common problems.

In Part III, "Special Topics" (Chapters 9 through 11), I describe how to extend Active Directory with new attributes and classes and how to perform some network administration tasks using scripts. In the final chapter, I look ahead by introducing how to program Active Directory for the Web and how Active Directory will change in the next release of Windows.

Although ADSI allows you to communicate with a variety of directory services besides Active Directory, I don't cover every aspect of ADSI; for example, I don't discuss creating ADSI providers, which allow directory vendors to produce a layer of code that allows ADSI to communicate with a proprietary directory service. For more information about using ADSI to access directories other than Active Directory, refer to the ADSI Software Development Kit (SDK) available on the companion CD and at http://www.microsoft.com/adsi/ or http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/.