Joe,

First and foremost I want to thank you very much for all your
contribution to the message boards on Active Directory access via .Net.
I also love your new book "The .NET Developer's Guide to Directory
Services Programming".

Your assessment is basically correct.  My goal is to read the records
from an LDIF file then programmatically process them.  The source of
the LDIF file however is NOT the Active Directory.

I work for a HUGE multi-national company that uses a massive X.500
directory for mastering all object information.  I get a very large
daily LDIF file with the objects exported from the X.500.

Today I use Perl to parse the LDIF file and read each entry as a
record. I then use the OLE interface in Perl to set the global Active
Directory account data to match what was in the X.500 LDIF data after
some modification.

To move this process off of Perl and use .Net I would need two parts.
The ability to read an LDIF file and the ability to manipulate Active
Directory objects. Your book makes the second of the two tasks easy,
but the first is very important.

If no such library that can read an LDIF file exists, what would it
take to write a .Net class that can do that?

1 - Understand how LDIF files are formatted based on the RFC

2 - Know how to convert some LDIF fields from Base64

3 - Know how to construct a LDAP type object populated with the fields
and values from the LDIF object that was read.

This all sounds a bit too complex for me.  Especially since I am not
sure how to pass a object with these unknown parameters back and
fourth.  The Perl module that I used today, makes all this trivial.
Here is the link to Net::LDAP::LDIF

http://search.cpan.org/~gbarr/perl-ldap/lib/Net/LDAP/LDIF.pod

Any guidance at all would be greatly appreciated.  My goal in moving
from Perl way to keep all my code in .Net if possible.  I do miss the
access to all the readily available and very diverse Perl modules in
the move to .Net

Thanks for any help,
Jean-Marie Vaneskahian
jean@vaneskahian.com