Chapter 3. Container Enumeration Methods and Programmatic Domain Account Policy Manipulation

By combining the enumeration code segments found in this chapter with the code found in all chapters in Part II, "Exploring the ADSI Service Providers: Windows NT," of this text, you can quickly create applications that can manipulate either the entire enterprise or just a small subset of the Windows NT namespace.

Used alone, enumeration functions provide little additional information than that found in User Manager or Server Manager. However, when used recursively or when combined with the object manipulation code segments found in this text, you can reduce tedious manual tasks to just a few lines of code.

The IADsDomain interface allows programmatic manipulation of the account policy for a given domain. Just as you can programmatically manipulate the password age or password history length for a single user account using the IADsUser interface, you can also query and modify the default account lockout policy, password age, password length, and so on, that apply to all user accounts in a specific domain.

This chapter will explore the programmatic methods required to manipulate these functions using script written in the Visual Basic Integrated Development Environment (IDE). In particular, we will take a look at the following:

Enumerating domains in the Windows NT namespace
Managing Windows NT domain properties
Enumerating objects within a domain or computer
Creating and removing objects using IADsContainer

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