An ADSI Primer, Part 8: More About Manipulating Persistent and Dynamic Objects

Editor's note: This article is the eighth 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.

Last month, I showed you how to use ADSI to manipulate objects such as services and shares that exist on a local machine's SAM. This month, I want to extend that usage by showing you how to use ADSI to

• Enumerate a client's sessions and resources
• Show which users are currently logged on to a server and count all the logged-on users across a domain's PDC, BDCs, and other servers

Enumerating Sessions and Resources
Windows NT hosts two kinds of dynamic objects that you can use with ADSI to gain read-only access: sessions (i.e., instances in which users are connecting to a computer) and resources (i.e., instances in which users are accessing a file on a computer). When users connect to a file or a share on a computer, that instance creates both a session and a resource object. When the user disconnects, these dynamic objects cease to exist. . . .