About this Guide

A lot of work has been put into providing a directory service that is fully ready for the Enterprise. The intent of this guide is to provide you with the knowledge you need to take advantage of Active Directory™. This guide is broken down into the following sections:

About Active Directory

This is the minimum you should know about Active Directory concepts and features prior to beginning your development effort.

Using Active Directory

These are the "best practices" for performing different operations on Active Directory. The guidelines go from the simple to the more complex, including what you need to know about:

• Binding to Active Directory
• Reading and setting properties
• Querying
• Extending the schema
• Extending the UI to support the extended schema
• Security
• Working with access control
• User and group management
• Service publication
• Dealing with consistency
• Design Considerations for Disconnected Operations
• Writing an ADSI Extension
• How to set and get user and application configuration using policy
• Taking advantage of Active Directory to deploy your applications

Since the primary and recommended API for Active Directory is ADSI, the guidelines should be used in parallel with the ADSI SDK material. The guidelines do not detail the interfaces, rather the guidelines give detail on "best practices" as well as code samples for the more commonly used interfaces.

• Active Directory Basics
• Active Directory Core Concepts
• Active Directory Architecture