Using Active Directory in . NETBy Paul D. Sheriff. Sometimes your . NET applications need to interact with Microsoft Active Directory (AD) to authenticate users, get a list of users, retrieve groups, or determine which users are within which AD groups. There are a few different approaches you can use to retrieve information from your AD database within your domain. One approach is to utilize the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) using the Directory. Entry and Directory.

The properties have generic objects associated with them as the class has no concept of their content. If you wish you will need to cast or convert to more specific.

Search classes under the System. Directory. Services namespace. Another approach is to use the complete set of class wrappers around AD under the System.

Directory. Services. Account. Management namespace.

In this article, you will learn to use LDAP queries to retrieve information from your AD database. The LDAP classes are much faster and allow you to get at almost all of AD, whereas the wrapper classes only allow you to get at Users, Groups, and Computer objects in AD.

I want to be able to obtain the userid of a user in Active Directory using the display name of that user. The display name is obtained from a database, and has been. PowerShell scenarios for Azure Active Directory group-based licensing.

1. Detailed coverage of the Azure Active Directory application manifest, which represents an application's identity configuration in an Azure AD tenant, and is used to.
2. Inside Active Directory is a 960-page book about the architecture, administration and planning of Active Directory. The target audience is a current NT professional.
3. Specifies the Active Directory Domain Services instance to connect to, by providing one of the following values for a corresponding domain name or directory server.
4. This article will explain how to perform operations on Active Directory (AD) using C#. In this step-by-step tutorial, I will build a class library (DLL) project that.
5. Active Directory Commandlets Pre-Step: Before proceeding you may need to import the Active Directory commandlets on older versions of PowerShell.
6. When completing a fresh installation of CUCM it will use its own embedded LDAP directory to store End User information. In most cases it is preferred to integrate.
7. User accounts that are.

You will find that the Directory. Entry and Directory. Searcher objects are faster than the objects in the System. Directory. Services. Account. Management namespace. A few definitions are in order before we get into the actual code. First off, AD is a database- based system that provides authentication, directory, policy, and other services in a Microsoft Windows environment.

LDAP is a language for querying and modifying items within a directory service like AD database. It is important to note that LDAP is a standard language used to query any kind of directory service. AD is a Microsoft proprietary implementation of a directory service and, as such, has some custom extensions on top of the LDAP standard language.

Building the LDAP Connection String. The first thing you must do in order to connect to any directory service is to create an LDAP connection string. A connection string uses the following format: LDAP: //DC=. This is accomplished with a few different classes located within the System. Directory. Services. System. Directory.

Services namespace. The Directory. Entry class is used to hold the LDAP connection string. The Directory. Searcher class is used to perform a search against the LDAP connection. You set the Filter property on the Directory.

Searcher object to a valid LDAP query. Download The Speech Of Akbaruddin Owaisi. Calling the Find. All() method on the Directory. Searcher object returns a Search.

Result. Collection object. This collection of Search.

Result objects contains the values retrieved from the AD. Listing 1 shows the complete code you need to retrieve all users from your AD domain. By default, the only property returned from your AD database is the “name” property.

If you are familiar with AD, you know that users can be created with email address, first name, middle name, last name, and many other properties. There are additional steps that you must perform if you wish to retrieve these properties that will be discussed in the next section. What is interesting in Listing 1 is that you reference the “name” property using . You would think that there can only be one name, and you are correct. However, because Search. Result is a generic object that could contain any type of AD object, each of the properties could have more than one value. For instance, if you retrieve a Group object from AD, one of the properties “members” contains an array of member names that make up that group.

You may request more information, but you must tell LDAP what you wish to retrieve prior to performing your search. In the Directory. Searcher object this is accomplished by adding property names to the Properties. To. Load property. You must know the names of the properties that are available in your directory service. Listing 2 shows adding the appropriate properties for Microsoft’s AD database to retrieve information such as the user’s first name (givenname), last name (sn), email address (mail), and login name (user.

Principal. Name). An additional property you might find useful is distinguished. Name. This gives you the full LDAP query for that particular user.

This LDAP query looks similar to this. CN=Person,CN=Bruce Jones,DC=XZY,DC=net.

Notice the ”if” statement in the code in Listing 2 prior to displaying any of the properties. The reason for this is that these properties are optional within AD and if you don’t perform the check, you could get a null reference exception. You don’t need to put an “if” statement around the name and distinguished. Name properties because these will always be there, but you might want to keep things consistent.

Build a User. Searcher Method. As you can imagine, you will probably create a Directory. Searcher for retrieving users in many places.

It’s a good idea to create a method that creates the Directory. Searcher object for you and populates it with the list of properties that you are interested in. Listing 3 shows a method called Build. User. Searcher to which you will pass in a Directory. Entry object. An instance of a Directory.

Searcher object is created, and then the properties are added to the Properties. To. Load property. Build Extension Method for Reading Properties. Another tedious task in the code shown in Listing 2 is constantly having to check for the existence of a property prior to retrieving it.

Instead of writing this code over and over, create an extension method that either returns the property value or an empty string if the property is not found. The next code snippet is an extension method for the Search. Result class. public static class ADExtension. Methods. . This can be accomplished quite easily. You only need to add one additional LDAP query to the Filter property. Adding (name=P*) searches for all users with a name that begins with the letter P. Filter =. . You build a Directory.

Searcher object and set the filter as described in the code snippet above. The rest of the code is the same as presented in Listing 2 except you are now using the Build. User. Searcher method and the extension method to retrieve a property of the user. Get One User. You can search for a specific user by using the previous technique of adding an LDAP query. Just eliminate the asterisk (*) from the query in order to do an exact match. Notice that the code in Listing 5 uses a Search. Result instead of a Search.

Result. Collection. Call the Find. One method instead of Find. All because you are interested in retrieving a single user and not a list. If the user is not found, a null Search. Result object is returned. Get All Groups. As you have seen in all of the previous code, you are always using the same set of classes for all your querying needs. Namely; Directory.

Entry, Directory. Searcher, Search. Result, and Search. Result. Collection. These classes handle almost all of your querying needs. Look at the code in Listing 6 to see an example of retrieving all Groups from Active Directory.

You will notice that the code is almost identical, except the Filter property has a different LDAP query. I added another new option to this code and that is the ability to set a Sort option. You will most likely wish to retrieve your results in some sorted order.

You can specify any property to sort the data by creating a Sort. Option object passing in the name of the property to sort upon. The code in Listing 6 shows one of the features of the Search. Result property that I discussed earlier: the ability for a property to contain an array of additional information. A group can be a member of another group and a group can contain members. Specify whether you wish to retrieve these additional properties by adding them to the Properties. To. Load property just like you did for retrieving additional user properties.

After performing the Find. All method, all the data is retrieved and all you have to do is to check to see if there is data within the memberof and member arrays. Loop though the data and display all of the groups of which this group is a member and the members of this group. Creating a Login Screen.

Another possible use of these AD objects you have been learning is to authenticate a user against an AD.

Choosing a Domain Name for your Active Directory. It is a really important step in the planning phase when considering what Active Directory (AD) Domain Name to select. This is especially. Personally, I find the first option to be the best, even though. Microsoft. The main reason why it is not recommended is that if you are not very familiar with DNS administration.

Active Directory records to the Internet. However, if you design the infrastructure correctly, you will. Proper DNS design will be. I have experienced firsthand this“gotcha” back with my first implementation of Active Directory using the same internal and external name. For example, let’s say that the domain name is.

Our DNS administrators correctly separated the DNS environment so that a dedicated external DNS infrastructure supports the. Internet traffic, while the internal DNS infrastructure supports the Active Directory infrastructure. However, when internal users.

While researching this issue, I noticed that the DOMAIN CONTROLLERS in the widgets. IP address of each DC. This is the default behavior of Active Directory Domain Controllers. Therefore, the internal DNS zone for Widgets. Public IP for website, simply an example)widgets. Public IP for website)As you may notice in this example, the private IPs 1.

Domain Controllers. The 6. 5. 8. 5. 0. IP of the external web server, created by the DNS Administrator. In this scenario, when a request would come into the internal DNS server for. Then your browser would connect on the first IP that it resolved the name. In this hypothetical scenario, you would expect that only 2.

DNS. round robin). There are a few ways to handle this situation: Educate your users to access the website by using the . In addition, in larger environments, this task becomes too difficult to keep up with because. Also, non- technical users really don't understand the difference between the. ITGeared. com and. ITGeared. com, so even if you educate them, they will most likely try either record until. Install IIS on DCs.

The second method of installing IIS on the DCs will easily mitigate this issue. The reason is because if the client resolves the domain name.

IPs of the DCs, the client will access the web services installed on the DCs. All you would need to do is either redirect the user via.

IIS tools, or create a default page that redirects the user programmatically. Registry Edits. The third method can work very well in situations where security policies do not allow IIS to be installed on Domain Controllers. Preventing. the Ldap. IPAddress from registering in DNS can be an easy fix, but it does require a manual entry in the registry of each domain controller and a.

DNS for those DCs that also server as the Global Catalog server. The registry entry should be created prior to the DCPROMO. To prevent a DC from registering the domain name with its IP address, create a DWORD called “Register. Dns. ARecords” in this. HKLM\SYSTEM\Current.

Control. Set\Services\Netlogon\Parameters. This DWORD Specifies whether the domain controller registers Domain Name System (DNS) A (address) records for the domain. If the domain. controller is a global catalog resource, then this entry also determines whether the domain controller registers DNS A records for the global. We will assume that all DCs in this example are also. Global Catalog servers.

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