Directory Services encapsulate and expose objects within a network, offering a unified way of accessing different types of data. Of particular interest on the Windows platform is the Active Directory, which supplies powerful and flexible methods for managing users, servers, and resources in a single information store that is globally accessible throughout an enterprise. Knowing how and when to use a Directory Service effectively will enable you to develop applications that store infrastructure information safely, as well as perform management or administrative tasks.This book looks at the .NET Framework's support for programming Directory Services, and in particular, the Active Directory. The reader will learn how to create applications to view, search, or manage directory entries such as users as well as physical resources such as printers. The book is divided into two sections. The first covers some background information about directory services, Active Directory and ADSI, and then looks in detail at the support provided by the .NET Framework in the System.DirectoryServices namespace for working with directory services. The second part looks at some of the most important specific tasks faced by developers and administrators, and shows how to achieve these through C# code.This will be the only book dedicated to programming directory services using the .NET Framework. This topic isn't well covered in any of the more general books, and anecdotal evidence from the .NET mailing lists suggests that there's a lot of demand for information on the topic.