Developing Secure Applications with Visual Basic

Active Directory and Security

The Active Directory Security Interface (ADSI) goes well beyond the Active Directory in Windows 2000. Using ADSI, you can access not only Active Directory, but also Novell's NDS directory service, any X.500 directory service, Microsoft's Exchange directory, NT 4 directory, and several others. The Active Directory directory service is accessed through the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), the protocol that is also used to access Exchange and X.500 directories. In this chapter, you'll be working with the NT 4 directory service (WinNT), and the Active Directory service (LDAP), but you can also just as easily work with Novell NetWare 3.x (NWCOMPAT), or Novell NetWare Directory Service (NDS) using the same ...