18.6 Summary

Hopefully you now understand the basics of ADSI enough to be useful. It's a very robust API that allows you to interface to all aspects of both Active Directory and Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows Server 2003 servers. Even though the majority of this chapter covers Microsoft operating systems, the code does use the LDAP namespace and is portable to many other directory services. One of ADSI's biggest strengths is its ability to communicate with a variety of directory services using either LDAP or a provider-specific namespace.

In the next chapter, we will cover the IADs interface in more depth along with a discussion of the Property Cache. A chapter covering ADO will follow that, which should give you all the necessary tools to query and manipulate Active Directory.