Summary

This chapter discussed the architecture of Active Directory: the important concepts of domains, trees, and forests. You can access information in the complete enterprise. When writing applications that access Active Directory services, you must be aware that the data you read might not be up-to-date because of the replication latency.

The classes in the System.DirectoryServices namespaces give you easy ways to access Active Directory services by wrapping to the ADSI providers. The DirectoryEntry class makes it possible to read and write objects directly in the data store.

With the DirectorySearcher class you can do complex searches and define filters, timeouts, properties to load, and a scope. By using the global catalog, you can speed up the search for objects in the complete enterprise, because it stores a read-only version of all objects in the forest.