Active Directory in .NET
Granted, that the company I work for has been late to deploy LDAP, which they're still working on (btw). This forces us developers to continue using the good ol' WinNT:// service provider for Active Directory.
It's really frustrating when simple tasks take longer than expected. A list of domains or a list of groups in a domain was very simple and easy to do in old ASP taking only minutes.
To migrate this same information to .NET has taken a LOT longer than it should IMHO.
Now that I believe I have the main problem narrowed down to security ( since this is an ASP.NET application). This was finally discovered after creating a test WinForm application.
I certainly hope that LDAP has better performance and even if it does I would bet money that it's still not extremely fast. This is one area that I wish Microsoft would backend in SQL and create some API's or something where we can get a query of just 5,000 item back in seconds, instead of the minutes it currently takes using WinNT:. (This was retrieving the properties for each of the 5,000 items as well.)
Well, just don't try to get a User's NT GROUPS using System.DirectoryServices, from what I've heard and found, you have to actually create a COM Interop wrapper for ActiveDs.
And, then if you try to strongly name your assembly, you'll have to follow these steps as well: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;313666
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About dwalker
David Walker has over 15 years experience in application development with over 50% of that employed as a consultant with companies such as: Texaco, Bank of Oklahoma, Winner Communications (ESPN.com) and IBM Global Services. At the age of 14, he began his application development ambitions with a Commodore 64, BASIC, and a 300 baud modem. Even at that early age, he primarily focused on two specific application types: multi-user communities and database applications.
His hunger to learn as much as possible about development lead him through courses such as DBase III, DBase IV, Pascal, C, C++, Java, and several in UNIX. He started his development career first doing heavy processing with Access and VBA, then moved on to VB 3, Oracle, and Delphi. Visual Basic was one environment that remained constant for many years, including his very first .NET projects performed in Visual Basic.NET.
After working several years on very high end internal Corporate applications, the consultant company he was working for, sought out his ideas for actual software products that could be packaged and sold. He had already developed several prototypes of a dynamic portal application, before portals even became popular, so this became the logic decision and he became the Director of Product Development. Under his direction, a team of developers and graphic artists, took a skinning approach before that become popular, and completed the core portal application, and continued on to developer 15+ add-on modules, including things such as: Help Desk Ticket Systems, Change Control, Records Management, Human Resources, and many more applications. Eventually, it spun off into it's own separate company as KnowledgeGEAR, a complete intranet in the box solution.
Having worked as a consultant, he has had a experience with a very wide range of applications and architectures, at one time, even converting several Fox Pro and GW-Basic applications to VB 6 and ASP. His early training of Unix and the C language and years of experience with JavaScript, lead him very quickly to C#, where he has remained focused ever since.
He is the current President of the
Tulsa Developers .NET user group.. He has been an MCP since 2003 and MCAD and MCSD since 2005. He is currently pursuing his MCDBA and then on to MCSE.