Active Directory, Second Edition

Chapter 18. Scripting with ADSI

This chapter covers the basics of ADSI and VBScript so that even inexperienced programmers and system administrators can understand how to write useful scripts. If you’re used to another language, such as VB, you’ll find that it is very easy to convert the ADSI examples from VBScript, which is covered in detail in Chapter 25. In Chapter 25 we also cover how to add VBScript code to HTML web pages so that you can write web applications that utilize ADSI. In Chapter 20, we show you how to use ADO to search Active Directory and retrieve sets of records according to the powerful search conditions that you impose. Other chapters take this knowledge and extend it so that you can manipulate other aspects of Active Directory, such as permissions and auditing (Chapter 23) and modifying the schema (Chapter 24). Several additional references to web pages containing further information and documentation are included at the end of this chapter, so that you can find more information.

What Are All These Buzzwords?

First, let’s take a look at some of the underlying technologies that you’ll use when developing scripts.

ActiveX

ActiveX, the base component of a number of these technologies, enables software components to interact with one another in a networked environment, regardless of the language in which they were created. Think of ActiveX as the method developers use to specify objects that the rest of us then create and access with our scripts in whatever language ...