Welcome
This site is the companion website for The .NET Developer's Guide to Directory Services Programming from Addison-Wesley Professional. Our purpose with both the book and the site is to provide a resource for developers writing directory services applications on the .NET platform, primarily for Active Directory. Our experience is that while very few of us do LDAP programming for a living, an awful lot of us need to do some LDAP work in our applications and spend way too much time spinning our wheels. If this is you, we hope to make your life better! Our book is part of AW's .NET Development Series, which is one of the most highly regarded .NET publication series on the market today.
So, who are we? We are Ryan Dunn and Joe Kaplan, two Microsoft MVPs who specialize in .NET development and who happen to have learned a lot about LDAP along the way. Both of us spend most of our time building large, complex web applications. We also do a lot of application security and Identity and Access Management (I&AM) work in our day to day business. You can find our LDAP blogs on this site.
As promised in the book, the files section of the website contains all of the code listings from the book for your copy and paste pleasure in both C# and VB.NET. Additionally, we've added some more complex "value-added" samples and frameworks that were way outside of the scope of the book that we hope you'll find valuable. Check back often, as we'll probably continue to add stuff that we create or discover long after the book is done.
We'll also be hosting forums here. Primarily, we hope to discuss materials in the book. If the forums here take off, then so be it! The more LDAP the merrier.
Our esteemed publisher has graciously agreed to provide an online chapter from our book in pdf format free of charge. Chapter 10 contains a lot of really useful material on managing users that we thought would be directly useful. We hope you like it, and if so, we hope it convinces you to buy the rest of the book. We don't think you'll be disappointed!
If you do decide to buy the book, thanks! If you are going to buy it, we would be even more pleased if you click through the link to the right to give us some love and help keep this site running.
News
6-March-2007 - ADFS Forum Launched
I'm really into Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) these days and decided that it might be nice to start a web discussion forum that focuses on this new subject. Any and all ADFS topics are welcome, including high-level concept stuff, admin/ops/deployment topics, federation server customization and claims or token-based application development.
Ryan and I have not written any books about this subject (yet), so I'm not certain we hold the same weight as "experts" in this area that we do with the .NET LDAP programming stuff, but these forums are really all about trying to help each other out anyway, so hopefully it will prove useful to some.
16-July-2006 - Tangible Software Solutions' Instant VB Really Works!
I'm not sure how many of you have ever needed to do source level conversion of a significant amount of C# source code to VB.NET, but if you do, check out Instant VB from Tangible Software Solutions. I tried a bunch of different stuff, and this is the only thing I've found so far that really works. Most conversion processes are fairly straightforward and some of the free tools work ok, but there are enough interesting details that can cause loss of fidelity and a lot of wasted time fixing things by hand. Sure, you can compile the source and reverse engineer it with Reflector, but you lose all your variable names and often get weird control flow interpretations. That all requires significant manual rework too. The demo is free. What do you have to lose?
15-July-2006 - VB.NET Samples Posted (Finally!)
These listing show the code samples from the book as printed with minor corrections put in place. In places where expanded samples are alluded to, those will come from the upcoming conversion of the "full listings" that Ryan rewrote for the website exclusively. We did not attempt to merge those into these samples yet. Sorry.
05-June-2006 - More Samples Posted
The full samples from the book (in C#) have been released. These contain all the non-trivial samples from the book and many of the larger classes without truncation. Also included is a configurable test harness and many supporting code samples. Using VS.NET and NUnit should allow readers to easily play with the book's code without too much hassle. Note that these samples in many cases are modified to work inside the test harness, but otherwise functionally identical.
11-May-2006 - Code is available and more is coming!
We have released the 'raw' sources to the book and they are available now for download. These are the source files taken verbatim from the book. As such, they will contain truncations in some cases. We are putting this out there because some folks will want the sources exactly as they appear.
In the new few days (hopefully), we will release a more full-featured set of sources without any truncations and put into a helpful test harness with configuration. These sample will not comply exactly 1:1 with the text in the book since they will be modified to work with configuration and trivial samples will be excluded. However, we think you will find them pretty useful and more in-depth.