Active Directory Programmer's Guide

Purpose

Active Directory™ is the directory service used in Microsoft® Windows® 2000 and is the foundation of Windows 2000 distributed networks. Active Directory provides secure, structured, hierarchical storage of information about the interesting objects in an enterprise network; such as users, computers, services, and so on. The directory provides rich support for locating and working with these objects.

This guide provides an overview of Active Directory from a programmer's perspective. The guide also provides discussion and sample code for Active Directory programming tasks, from the basics such as searching for objects and reading properties, to more advanced tasks such as service publication.

Windows 2000 provides a user interface for users and administrators to work with the objects and information in Active Directory. This guide describes how to extend and customize that user interface. It also describes how to extend Active Directory itself by defining new object classes and attributes.

Where Applicable

Network administrators will use Active Directory programming to automate common administrative tasks, such as adding users and groups, managing printers, and setting permissions on network resources.

Independent software vendors and end user developers will use Active Directory programming to "directory enable" their products and applications. Services can publish themselves in Active Directory, clients can use Active Directory to find services, and both can use the directory to find and manipulate other objects of interest.

Developer Audience

You can use the Active Directory Services Interface (ADSI) or the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) APIs to write programs that access the information in Active Directory. Most of the samples in this guide use ADSI, which is supported by languages such as C and C++, as well as automation-compliant languages like Microsoft® Visual Basic® and Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript).

Run-time Requirements

Active Directory runs on Windows 2000. However, client applications may be written on and run on Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT® 4.0, and Windows 2000. There are client components available for all these operating systems available on the MSDN™ web site. In addition, developers will want the ADSI SDK, also available on the MSDN web site.

See Also

ADSI Programmer's Guide

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol API

About Active Directory

General information about Active Directory.

Using Active Directory

Programmer's Guide to using Active Directory.

Active Directory Reference

Documentation of Active Directory interfaces and methods.

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