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All the Active Directory user interface elements interact with the Windows shell in some fashion or another. While I won't get into the nitty-gritty of working with the shell or shell extensions, you might want to review the shell documentation in the Microsoft Platform SDK. Also, the components, objects, and programming interfaces described in this chapter are provided by Active Directory components, not ADSI components. You'll notice that, in addition to the ActiveDS.h header file, the samples include references to DSClient.h, DSAdmin.h, and ObjSel.h. These files are not part of the ADSI SDK, and you must install the Platform SDK to ensure the correct header and library files are available. The components of the Platform SDK that you will need are "Build Environment\Network and Directory Services\Active Directory Services Interface" and "Build Environment\Win32 API\Win32 API." You can download these components of the Platform SDK from http://msdn.microsoft.com/downloads/. The header and library files required to compile the code samples for this chapter are included on the companion CD. Additionally, for Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT 4.0, the Active Directory Client (DSClient.exe) must be installed. Installers for these clients are included on the companion CD.

Since the Active Directory user interface components don't support Automation, the scripting languages cannot use them. This is truly unfortunate because so many administrative tasks could be simplified by allowing scripts to utilize familiar Active Directory dialog boxes. Another limitation of the Active Directory components is the C/C++ style of the interfaces, which requires working with large structures containing arrays of structures. These structures are inconvenient to use from Microsoft Visual Basic and nearly impossible from scripting languages. So I'll stick to using C++ in this chapter.

OK, with that bit of housekeeping aside, on to the Active Directory common dialogs boxes and how to use them in your applications.