Active Directory, 3rd Edition

DirectoryEntry Basics

The DirectoryEntry class contains several properties to access the attributes of Active Directory objects. The following code shows how to display the currentTime attribute of the RootDSE:

Dim objRootDSE As New DirectoryEntry("LDAP://RootDSE")
Console.WriteLine(objRootDSE.Properties("currentTime")(0))

In the code, once we instantiated the DirectoryEntry object, we can access the currentTime attribute by passing it to the Properties property. The Properties property actually returns a collection of values for the attribute in the form of a PropertyCollection class, which is why we needed to specify an index of 0 to get at a specific value. If the currentTime attribute was multi-valued, we could get at the other values by incrementing the index to 1 and so on.

Tip

In object-oriented parlance, a property allows you to get or set an attribute of an object. A method typically results in some kind of action being taken on the object.

Now let's look at how to display all the values for all the attributes of an object in Active Directory. Again we will use RootDSE as the object we want to display:

Dim objRootDSE As New DirectoryEntry("LDAP://RootDSE")
Dim strAttrName As String
Dim objValue As Object
For Each strAttrName In objRootDSE.Properties.PropertyNames
    For Each objValue In objRootDSE.Properties(strAttrName)
        Console.WriteLine(strAttrName & " : " & objValue.ToString)
    Next objValue
Next strAttrName

As you can see, the Properties property, which returns a PropertyCollection ...