The .Net Developer's Guide to Directory Services Programming

by Joe Kaplan and Ryan Dunn

Book Overview

Identity and Access Management are rapidly gaining importance as key areas of practice in the IT industry, and directory services provide the fundamental building blocks that enable them. For... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0321350170
• ISBN13: 9780321350176
• Release Date: May 2006
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Length: 479 Pages
• Weight: 2.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 7.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A Good Guide to Challenging Ground

As other reviewers have noted, programming directory services is a complicated niche. This book provided a light and compass to a developer passing through this territory containing some rather strange-looking flora and fauna. My company's .NET-based application makes limited use of directory services. When migrating it to .NET 2.0, tens of warnings were generated when referencing the ActiveDs COM library, such as "could not convert the signature" and "At least one of the arguments for 'IPrivateDispatch.ADSIGetIDsOfNames' can not be marshaled". While the warnings did not affect application behavior, ignoring warnings encourages a mindset that could cause a developer to disregard real danger. This book provided two different ideas to fix the warnings. Both avoided the need to reference the entire ActiveDs.dll library. One idea was to use the enhanced .NET 2.0 classes directly to determine a user's group memberships (my particular need, addressed in Chapter 10). The other was to declare COM Interops for the subset of ActiveDs functionality actually needed (Appendix A). I ended up using the second alternative. The authors provided an example and a reference to a free third-party tool that generated the needed declarations. Other applications will use directory services more extensively, so their voyage may be more intricate. This book is a guidebook that will help you understand your choices before you set out. I commend the authors for their knowledge of this arcane area and their enthusiasm and ability to understandably share their knowledge.

Great Aid in programming Active Directory

This is one book that you need if you are writing code for Active Directory. The author understands what issues developers face and what details are important when implementing solutions. It is not a reindexing of manufacturer's manual. You can take code out of this book and use it with understanding. I have used this book extensively and repeatedly. Tauqir

definitive guide to .Net AD programming

If you're looking to write AD or ADAM code in .Net, this is the book to get. Joe and Ryan do a great job of covering this topic, balancing a light writing style with deep coverage of the material and practical advice about writing directory-enabled code in real-world environments. For me, the ideal technical reference is one that I can read cover-to-cover as well as jump to a particular topic as-need to get immediate help. This book serves both those needs extremely well; easily one of the best programming references I've read in a while and literally the only decent source for practical System.DirectoryServices advice.

Excellent Directory resource

The .NET Developer's Guide to Directory Services Programming provides valuable insight in how to properly write .NET applications that use Active Directory or ADAM. It covers pretty much everything you need to know, to be effective in programming against a Directory Service using both .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0. The book is very well written and provides sample code around any topic that it touches upon (download here: http://directoryprogramming.net/ ). Both the samples from the book (raw format) and a complete .NET Solution are provided that a developer can leverage to develop their own applications. The site also provides an active forum where you can post questions and problems around the topic. The level of support Ryan and Joe provide is remarkable. In fact, for most searches on Active Directory problems on google, you would find that in many cases, one of the authors is involved in the thread working towards a solution. The book starts out with a general explanation of LDAP and Active Directory. This is a high level overview of the concepts and terminology around Directory Services, LDAP, Domains etc. It also explains what different approaches to interacting with Directories are available to the programmer. Once the concepts have been explained, the book continues with CRUD operations. As you read this chapter, you will find the true value of the book. Not only does it contain all the information you'll need to program against a Directory Service, but it also points out many of the common pitfalls that a developer runs into when writing an application. The book also goes beyond what the .NET Framework provides to reveal what is actually happening under the hood, when this is appropriate. By doing that, the authors shed some light on why certain logic should be implemented in a particular way. The book subsequently covers the area of Directory Searches (basics and advanced) and how to read and write properties. Again, best practices and details on why one should implement logic a certain way are described in great detail. After that, the book provides insight in AD Schemas and Security. The last chapter of the first part goes into the .NET Active Directory namespace. Then, there is a second part, devoted to Practical Applications. This is where everything that was described earlier is put in perspective by using `real world' examples. Especially the chapter on authentication is very valuable. So overall, I believe this is an outstanding book that you cannot do without if you're serious about Directory Services programming. Together with the provided sample code and the forum, it will make you a better programmer and provide you with a fundamental understanding of Directory Services programming.

Excellent coverage of a difficult, poorly documented topic

This book is for all of you who need to write Active Directory based programs for .NET and ASP.NET. The voice of bitter experience: As anyone who has tried to learn how to program against Active Directory or ADAM knows, the on-line information at MSDN is extraordinarily confusing, not least because Microsoft has introduced several different technologies to access Active Directory--Native LDAP, System.DirectoryServices, System.DirectoryServices.ActiveDirectory, System.DirectoryServices.Protocols, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), ADSI, and the Net* and Ds* APIs. MSDN's sample code, once you get beyond the basics, is mostly written in C++ and/or VB script. Trust me, you don't want to go there without a knowledgeable mentor at your side. This book can be your guide. Both of the authors have a welcome presence on Active Directory forums and in the blogosphere. They are well-known as the go-to guys for Active Directory questions. The book reflects their practical experience responding to programmers' reasonable but difficult questions, such as "What's the best way to determine a user's effective group memberships, taking group nesting into account". I couldn't find this answer on MSDN. The book's first two chapters sort out the confusion about the many layers of Active directory programming in lucid, well-organized prose. Then, chapter-by-chapter, the book explains how to do just about anything a sane .NET programmer would want to do: CRUD operations, searching, schema, user and group management, authentication, and COM interop. Each sub-topic is succinct, explains advantages and disadvantages of various techniques, and contains code snippets that are valuable and easy to drop into your own code. The book is not padded with copy-and-paste material from MSDN. Nor is the book cast in the form of a sample application--my own pet peeve of how to hide useful information. The material is original and directly useful. The technique chapters are reasonably stand-alone. You don't have to read all that has gone before to get your question answered. The authors have a website for the book that contains downloadable code and a few free utilities. [...] Pros and cons: 1) If you are a sysadmin this probably isn't for you. The book is addressed strictly to programmers. 2) All of the examples are in C#. VB code is promised on the website but it's not there as of this writing. In any event, the Active Directory code examples are really agnostic under the .NET CLR. It should be easy enough for a programmer at the level of this book's intended audience to make the C# to VB translation. 3) There are some typos in the printed examples. The ones I have noticed are corrected in the on-line code.