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How Do I...Access Active Directory?

The Active Directory Service Interface (ADSI) accesses the capabilities of directory services from different network providers in a distributed computing environment to present a single set of directory service interfaces for managing network resources. Administrators and developers can use ADSI services to enumerate and manage the resources in a directory service, regardless of which network environment contains the resource. Use Active Directory to perform common administrative tasks, such as locating resources throughout the distributed computing environment.

This sample illustrates how to locate resources in the Active Directory. It is a small console application that can be run from a command prompt. The application takes one command line argument. The first argument has to be a valid path to an Active Directory entry.

Try running the following command, substituting the path for a valid Active Directory path for your particular network: 
> ADRead.exe "LDAP://CN=Clarify Operations Team,OU=Distribution Lists,DC=fabricom,DC=com"
In its simplest form, reading from the Active Directory involves:
  1. Creating a new DirectoryEntry:

    DirectoryEntry objDirEnt = new DirectoryEntry(path); Dim objDirEnt As DirectoryEntry = New DirectoryEntry(path) DirectoryEntry* objDirEnt = new DirectoryEntry(path);


  2. Reading the information from the Active Directory and printing it to the screen:

    string tab = " "; foreach(string key in objDirEnt.Properties.PropertyNames) { Console.WriteLine(tab + key + " = "); foreach(Object objCollection in objDirEnt.Properties[key]) Console.WriteLine(tab + tab + objCollection); } Dim tab As String = " " Dim key As String Dim objCollection As Object For Each Key In objDirEnt.Properties.PropertyNames Console.WriteLine(tab & key & " = ") For Each objCollection In objDirEnt.Properties(key) Console.WriteLine(tab & tab & CStr(objCollection)) Next Next ICollection* ValCol = objDirEnt->Properties->get_Item(Key); if (ValCol->Count > 0) { IEnumerator* Enum2 = ValCol->GetEnumerator(); while (Enum2->MoveNext()) { objValue = Enum2->Current; Console::WriteLine(S"\t\t{0}", objValue); } }

Example