Programmatic Extension

• The benefit of an LDIF file is that the administrator can look at it to see what it does. However, the schema can also be extended programmatically. Programmatic extensions have several merits (see below), however, a program is opaque; the administrator must trust the documentation shipped with the setup program. Use of programmatic schema extensions may be a barrier to deployment for applications that use them. A programmatic extension is invariant: it's a Windows NT executable. The binary cannot be tampered with unlike an LDIF or .CSV file, which can be edited inadvertently or maliciously.
• Programs can detect and recover from errors and provide intelligent feedback to the user.
• Programs handle UNICODE without resorting to Base64 encoding.
• Programs can leverage the MSI setup APIs.
• Programs can be signed to prove their authenticity