Active Directory Cookbook

1.3. Programming Notes

In the VBScript solutions, my intention was to provide the answer in as few lines of code as necessary. Since this book is not a pure programming book, I did not want to provide a detailed explanation of how to use ADSI or WMI. If you are looking for that, I recommend Part 3 of Active Directory, Second Edition. The intent of the VBScript code is to provide you the basics for how a task can be automated and let you run with it. Most examples only take some minor tweaking to make them do something useful for you.

Just as with the GUI and CLI solutions, there are some important issues to be aware of when looking at the VBScript solutions.

Serverless Binds

I mentioned earlier that in the GUI and CLI examples I did not provide instructions for targeting a specific domain controller to perform a task. Instead, I rely on serverless binds in most cases. The same applies to the API solutions. A serverless bind for the RootDSE looks like the following in VBScript:

set objRootDSE = GetObject("LDAP://RootDSE")

That code will query the RootDSE for a domain controller in the domain of the currently logged on user. You can target a specific domain instead by simply specifying the domain name in the ADsPath:

set objRootDSE = GetObject("LDAP://apac.rallencorp.com/RootDSE")

And similarly, you can target a specific domain controller by including the server name in the ADsPath:

set objRootDSE = GetObject("LDAP://dc1/RootDSE")

So depending on how your environment is set up and what ...