AD/ADAM and application settings storage

[mfaulcon]

Greetings, all.

I am developing a windows forms intranet app that uses AD for authentication
and access control. There are some application settings, however, that I'd
like to persist, along the lines of aspnet's personalization paradigm. Since
this as a smart client app, and the users may frequently access it from
different machines, I need this information stored on the backend, rather
than at the point of use.

AD/ADAM seems like the logical palce to do this, since it fits the bill, or
possibly the aspnet personalization structure. The microsoft ADAM FAQ lists
this same configuration as one of the primary reasons for the development of
ADAM, but I can't seem to find any usage examples, particularly on the setup
and configuration of ADAM, or of how the application settings would be
accessed and stored.

any guidance that someone could provide on this would be greatly appreciated.

Mark Faulcon

 

[Joe Kaplan \(MVP - ADSI\)]

The way to think about ADAM as an application developer in this scenario is
sort of like an empty SQL server database. Off the bat, it is just a
network endpoint that you can use to read and write data, but using the LDAP
protocol instead of SQL.

However, in order to get any useful data in and out of your ADAM store, you
first need some schema to support the data you want to use. In LDAP, data
is arranged hierarchically, like a file system, instead of in tables made of
rows and columns. Data is stored in objects that contain attributes (which
can contain multiple values and can also contain pointers to other objects,
forming foreign key relationships).

Probably the most important thing here is to come up with a design for your
schema and get that into an ADAM instance. Reading and writing the data
won't be a big deal once you've done that, although you'll have to figure
out your security model for how that should work.

There are some books that may help you here, including mine, which contains
a chapter with some high level useful stuff on schema design, and Joe
Richard's Active Directory 3rd Edition (don't get 2nd!), which contains a
lot more details and examples.

Joe K.

 

[Dominick Baier]

just came in...

maybe interesting for you

http://blogs.msdn.com/azman/archive/2006/07/26/679549.aspx