Chapter 22. Manipulating Persistent and Dynamic Objects

ADSI can be used for much more than just user, group, or generic directory manipulation. ADSI provides many interfaces that you can use to manipulate persistent and dynamic objects for a computer. Persistent objects are permanent parts of a directory or computer, such as shares, services, users, and groups. Dynamic objects aren't permanent but instead are things such as sessions (i.e., connections to a machine) and print jobs that a user initiates. In other words, ADSI lets you do the following:

• Dynamically start, stop, and manage services and manipulate the permanent attributes of those services

• Dynamically manipulate shares, creating and deleting them as required

• Dynamically manipulate computers' open resources and users' active sessions and manipulate the permanent objects representing those computers and users

• Dynamically manipulate print jobs and manipulate the permanent queues

Many of you may already be familiar with the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) interface, which overlaps with several of these functions. Depending on your preference, you can use ADSI or WMI for many of these tasks. We describe WMI in more detail in Chapter 26.