As part of a large Identity & Access Management project we’ve beenmigrating a number of LDAP dependent systems from running under ASP.NET 1.1 to the 2.0 framework. The upgrade process has been remarkably painless, with the notable exception of a small but significant “breaking” change to authentication with System.DirectoryServices. In .NET 1.1 it is perfectly acceptable to issue an LDAP simple bind with code like this:DirectoryEntry entry = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://ldap.somecompany.com:389/");
entry.Username = "cn=Directory Manager";
entry.Password = "bigsecret";
/*...use entry for searching, etc, here...*/
However, execution of this code will fail under the .NET 2.0 framework unless it is modified to explicitly set the DirectoryEntry’s AuthenticationType property, because the class constructor no longer defaults the propertyto None. Here is what new 2.0 code should look like:DirectoryEntry entry = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://ldap.somecompany.com:389/");
entry.Username = "cn=Directory Manager";
entry.Password = "bigsecret";
<strong>entry.AuthenticationType = AuthenticationTypes.None;</strong>
/*...use entry for searching, etc, here...*/
Overall, its an easy fix, but finding every use of an authenticated DirectoryEntry in code can be tricky…