An ADSI Primer, Part 7: Manipulating Persistent and Dynamic Objects

Editor's note: This article is the seventh part of a 12-part series about Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI) The series started in the January 1999 issue. Refer to previous installments for definitions and background information.

The future of automating systems management-related tasks lies with a technology called Windows Management Instrumentation. WMI is an implementation of the Desktop Management Task Force's (DMTF's) Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM) initiative, which provides standards for accessing and sharing management information in an enterprise environment. WMI has unique schema, classes, and interfaces. As part of the WBEM/WMI initiative, Microsoft intends to provide an ADSI-WMI bridge that will transparently expose data regardless of the underlying provider. Thus, WMI will likely become the primary technology that you'll use for systems management-related tasks.

In the meantime, you can use ADSI to accomplish some of those same tasks. ADSI provides a host of interfaces that you can use to manipulate persistent objects and dynamic objects in the Windows 2000 (Win2K) Active Directory (AD) or Windows NT SAM. Persistent objects are permanent parts of a directory. For example, a computer's shares and services are persistent objects. Dynamic objects aren't permanent parts of a directory. For example, sessions (i.e., connections to a machine) and print jobs that users initiate are dynamic objects. . . .