In recent post we have discussed how to track Active Directory changes effeciently with PowerShell .
Now the same thing we can achieve with C#. And if you would wonder why C# since we have had it already in PowerShell ? Well maybe you would be writing a form of REST API for your enterprise ? Or writing application for personnel who is not fluent with scripting ( the ppl that do use GUI 🙂 )
Neverless this is going to be nice and easy. I will not be using screenshoots of Visual Studio in this post but just providing you with the information needed.
The architecture and design is totally up to you 🙂 I will introduce you to basics needed to put the bits and pieces together. To hold information which we receive it would be best to create a class with properties we will be interested in and hold that in a list.
public class adresult
{
string objName {get;set;}
string objDN {get;set;}
...
string objXYZ {get;set;} # Whatever else properties you would be interested in
}
That was easy 🙂 Now let’s get to write our application. I focus here on console application but you can you whatever else type suitable for you.
Let’s prepare LDAP connections :
string ldapSrv = "LDAP://<LDAP-path>";
string ldapFilter = "(objectClass=user)";
// File to store our cookie
string ldapCookie = @"c:\adsync-cookie.dat";
// set up search
DirectoryEntry dir = new DirectoryEntry(ldapSrv);
DirectorySearcher searcher = new DirectorySearcher(dir);
searcher.Filter = ldapFilter;
searcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add("name");
searcher.PropertiesToLoad.Add("distinguishedName");
searcher.SearchScope = SearchScope.Subtree;
searcher.ExtendedDN = ExtendedDN.Standard;
Next is the interesting – which is synchronization object
// create directory synchronization object
DirectorySynchronization sync = new DirectorySynchronization();
// check whether a cookie file exists and if so, set the dirsync to use it
if (File.Exists(ldapCookie))
{
byte[] byteCookie = File.ReadAllBytes(ldapCookie);
sync.ResetDirectorySynchronizationCookie(byteCookie);
}
Lastly is combining of what we have prepared and executing search
// Assign previously created object to searcher
searcher.DirectorySynchronization = sync;
// Create group of our objects
List<adresult> ADresults = new List<adresult>();
foreach (SearchResult result in searcher.FindAll())
{
adresult objAdresult = new adresult();
objAdresult.Objname = (string)result.Properties["name"][0];
string[] sExtendedDn = ((string)result.Properties["distinguishedName"][0]).Split(new Char[] { ';' });
objAdresult.objDN = sExtendedDn[2];
ADresults.Add(objAdresult);
}
// write new cookie value to file
File.WriteAllBytes(ldapCookie, sync.GetDirectorySynchronizationCookie());
// Return results
return ADresults;
This concludes this short post. I hope you would be able to use it for your complex Active Directory scenarios.
