The .NET Developer's Guide to Directory Services Programming

Anyone who wants to include access to the Active Directory / ADAM via the ADSI providers (LDAP, WinNT, IIS, etc) and are finding themselves lost or overwhelmed while sorting thru the .NET environment on their own, need this book. Regardless of your previous experience in scripting or programming with ADSI (including none), this title provides the information you need in a relatively compact manner that brings you up to speed and gets you working productively before you even finish. The book starts off with a quick introduction to ADSI and the .NET framework: light on history, heavy on solidifying the readers understanding of how the .NET framework's Directory Services got where it is. The middle of the book concentrates on explaining the core set of objects needed to bind, read, write, search, etc., spending the right amount of time on each topic with clear language and to-the-point examples. You could actually put the book down at that point with a clear understanding and the ability to perform the needed tasks. The last section of the book takes your skills even further, starting with showing you how to extend the schema, work with security, and manage namespaces. With those sections complete comes complete walk-thrus on practical applications you can develop as well as sections on hints, tips and troubleshooting. Some potential VB readers may be put off by the fact that all the code examples are in C#. As the examples are typically short and dealing with objects, non C# developers shouldn't have any issue translating the code; if all else fails, the author has posted complete VB translations for download. This title proves itself to be not only an efficient learning resource, but also serves as a reference for Directory Services that you will use again and again. The authors have created a book that truly aims at demystifying the process and demonstrating to the reader that the technology is not as convoluted as other ADSI books make it out to be. Even though at the time of this review there are few books dedicated to .NET Directory Services available, this is a must have and will continue to prove its value for quite some time.

I purchase this book about three years ago along with a couple others as I was dissatisfied with the limitations of scripting and needed to do more. It is the best book I have found to take AD programming to the next level and after a number of years it is still the best book out there. Let's face it, there are not a lot of system administrators out there that like to program but once you marry AD to .NET there isn't anything problem you can't overcome when managing AD. If you can program and want to automate AD account creation and management you want this book. With imagination and talent you can use what you learn from this book to tie to your HR records and manage the life cycle of employees accounts, the resources attached to those accounts and free your administrators from the drudgery of day to day account management.

This book is pretty good and it has some good examples. The problem is that the author is all over the place in this book and does not use any of the examples in any way that would be helpful! The author's writing style leaves much to be desired. I don't know why so many people have given it such high ratings? I know that this is a tough topic but come on I think if you know a subject you can do better than this.

If you are or may be in the future, doing directory services programming then this book is a must have. It also suffices a quick reference as it has code sprinkled around so that you can get up to speed quickly. If anything, it is sort of lacking on other LDAP directories. It does have the history of LDAP and does show where the differences are between AD and the others. If your primary focus is other directories, this may not be the end all book for you, but should still suffice as a reference. If AD is your main focus, buy this now, you won't be disappointed.

Active Directory is an important offering by Microsoft, primarily for use within its .NET Framework. What Kaplan and Dunn suggest here is that the programmer-level documentation for Active Directory being furnished by Microsoft is somewhat awkward to use and understand. So this book is offered. The context is how to code LDAP in the namespace of System.DirectoryServices. The code examples are from both .NET 1.1 and .NET 2.0. Though the reader should probably migrate to 2.0 anyway, as this is significantly improved over 1.1. Also, the examples are given in C#. If you are an experienced VB coder, you should still be able to easily follow the C# logic. The code examples are brief enough to enable that, and C# is a very clean language, notationally. Part 2 of the book is probably the key section for most readers. You might be trying to integrate a corporate-wide directory with other applications. Perhaps to authorise those applications, depending on a valid user, as given by Active Directory, say. So Part 2 delves heavily into user and group management. For the latter, its definition and populating it with users is shown to be straightforward. From which you can build higher level logic.

My company bought the paperback and I bought the Kindle version because I couldn't do without this book. Yes, some time has passed since it was written and the authors stressed over breaking changes in .NET 2.0, but it is still relevant and I have found nothing that comes close to it. I spent a *lot* of time trying to find this information via Google searches and with I had found this book sooner. I wish the authors would come out with a new version, but that is a minor complaint.

A few years ago I wrote an application at work that would import information from our payroll system into active directory on a nightly basis. The application was run on a scheduled task and in place for nearly 3 years before I had to touch it again. A few months ago I looked for a book about programing for directory services and was surprised that not much had been published over the last few years. This is a good book and taught me a couple different ways to handle the updates into AD. All in all, it paid for itself and provided me some efficiency that I didn’t have before. I would recommend this book to others.

I agree with one of the previous reviews that the topics were all over the place. The points that were presented were in bits and pieces and none of the exmaples were actually start-to-finish code. What code was presented was primarily C# and the VB code that was selected as parallel implementations was not functional. If you are a VB.Net programmer looking for good books with sample code for the DirectoryServices Classes, you are better off using the Object Browser in Visual Studio and following the definitions yourself.

The .Net Developer's Guide to Directory Services Programming The book is exactly what I needed and the communications with the reseller have been absolutely great, I can only suggest to make business with them, because they work for the customer's satisfaction, this is absolutely the way to successfully drive an on-line service, BRAVI! :)