For any experienced .NET developer, the book, “The .NET Developer’s Guide to Directory Services Programming”, represents an excellent introduction to programming directory services. Both the 1.1 and 2.0 versions of the .NET Framework are covered in the book. The book’s content has been divided into three major parts.

The first part looks at the fundamentals, beginning with an introduction to LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) and Active Directory. Examples of subsequent topics that are tackled include searching with the DirectorySearcher; advanced LDAP searches; reading and writing LDAP attributes; and security in directory services programming.

The second part of the book is comprised of practical solutions for common problems. The areas that are investigated are user management, group management and authentication, with the large number of examples written in C#.

The last part of the book consists of three appendices respectively devoted to COM interop in .NET; LDAP tools for programmers; and a troubleshooting and help guide. The intended readership of this book is seasoned .NET enterprise application developers. So if you are new to .NET programming, this is not the book to read. For more information, visit “Directory Programming .NET”, the companion web site to the book, which is located at www.directoryprogramming.net

The .NET Developer’s Guide to Directory Services Programming

Authors: Joe Kaplan & Ryan Dunn

Format: Soft cover, 512 pages

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional (www.awprofessional.com/msdotnetseries)

Published: 2006

ISBN: 0321350170

Price: $US 49.99