Active Directory, Second Edition

Using VB.NET

Since the majority of the code we’ve demonstrated so far in this book has been written in VBScript, you may be wondering why we are going to talk about Visual Basic.NET (VB.NET). Unfortunately, one of the drawbacks with the .NET Framework is that it currently does not provide native support for VBScript. It does support JScript, but since Visual Basic is a much more powerful language than JScript, we will use VB.NET in our examples. It is still unclear what Microsoft’s future direction is in regard to providing native support for scripting languages like VBScript in .NET. Until that happens, you should get more familiar with the .NET class library and gain some experience with Visual Basic, which will ultimately increase your capabilities as a programmer. As we mentioned earlier, one of the design goals for the .NET Framework was simplicity. With the .NET Framework class library, Microsoft has made developing Windows-based applications significantly easier. As far as Active Directory goes, it will not take long at all to map your ADSI knowledge to the classes, properties, and methods in the System.DirectoryServices namespace.

To get started using VB.NET, you’ll need to get an integrated development environment (IDE) such as Visual Studio.NET (VS.NET), which is available from http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/. Once you have VS.NET, you should download the latest .NET Framework SDK, which is available from http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/. Once you have both of ...