Chapter 1. Overview of the Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI)

The job description of a system administrator rarely includes reference to the tedious tasks that are inherently part of the responsibilities of most support professionals. To have time for the more interesting aspects of their jobs, many administrators turn to scripting languages to automate monotonous tasks. While Microsoft included several command-line utilities in the original release of Windows NT, these tools were somewhat limited in terms of functionality and offered the administrator no option but to run these scripts from a command prompt. Although this may be adequate for scripts intended for limited internal use, shelling to a command prompt is a far from acceptable solution for inclusion in a Graphical User Interface (GUI) application. Thus, to access additional functionality not included in the command-line tools, or to avoid the need to shell to a command prompt, developers were forced to directly access the appropriate Application Programming Interface (API) to perform the desired action.

Whereas most C++ programmers are intimately familiar with manipulating APIs, most system administrators familiar with shell scripting or even Visual Basic found themselves in some rather uncharted territory. Administrators wishing to automate tasks beyond the functionality provided by the command-line tools had no choice but to turn to third-party tools, to use direct API calls, or to wait for someone else to develop an easier method to automate the administrative tasks at hand.