Hey, Scripting Guy! Quick-Hits Friday: The Scripting Guys Respond to a Bunch of Questions (11/6/09)

Using the Active Directory DirectoryEntry Class

Hey, Scripting Guy! I have been writing some scripts for Active Directory, and this past weekend I ran into something that puzzled me. When a search is performed against Active Directory (using the DirectoryEntry class and searcher class), and when the GetDirectoryEntry method is called against the returned SearchResult objects, the members of the newly returned DirectoryEntry objects do not match the members listed on MSDN at all (for the .NET class).

Why is that? The Windows PowerShell GetDirectoryEntry method seems to have bound directly to the Active Directory object, whereas the MSDN documentation speaks of returning a DirectoryEntry object with a number of methods and properties available to it. And is there a way to return a true instance of the .NET class in Windows PowerShell?

Microsoft Scripting Guy Ed Wilson here. The DirectoryEntry class is documented on MSDN. To gain access to some of the methods and properties described in the MSDN article, you will need to access the base object, which is the .NET Framework class that was used to create the object we see in Windows PowerShell. In many cases, accessing the base object is not required. But because of the way that Active Directory Services Interface (ADSI) created it, we need to use the base object from time to time. An example of obtaining a DirectoryEntry object by using the ADSI type accelerator and displaying its base properties is seen here:

$de = [adsi]”LDAP://dc=nwtraders,dc=com”

$de.psbase | Get-Member

The base members of the DirectoryEntry object are seen here:

You can, of course, create a DirectoryEntry object directly as seen here. There are five different constructors available for this class. The different constructors are all documented on MSDN:

$de = new-object System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry

You will still need to use PSBase to access all of the methods and properties, but the advantage of creating your own object is you get to define the constructor that is used. I have written several Hey, Scripting Guy! articles that talk about this.

Hey, Scripting Guy! In regards to the Can I Determine Which Folders Are Using the Most Space on My Computer? article, I appreciate the level of detail and helpfulness of this article. The script was written using Windows PowerShell 2.0. For those folks like me who are still using Windows PowerShell 1.0, how can such a task be done?

Hey, Scripting Guy! How can I make the distinction between a 32-bit and a 64-bit version of Windows Server 2008 using VBScript?

— VJ

Here is some Windows PowerShell code I wrote to determine if a computer is 32-bit or if it is 64-bit.

Function Test-64

{ If($env:PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE -match ’64’) { $true } ELSE { $false }}

Function Test-32

{ if($env:PROCESSOR_ARCHITECTURE -match ’86’) { $true } ELSE { $false} }

In the two test functions, I read the value of the Processor_Architecture environmental variable. Here is a VBScript that you can modify to search for the Processor_Architecture variable to use in your VBScript code.

Well, this concludes another edition of Quick-Hits Friday. It also concludes another exciting week on the Script Center. Join us next week as we delve into the mysteries of…we’ll let that remain a mystery for now.

If you want to know exactly what we will be looking at tomorrow, follow us on Twitter or Facebook. If you have any questions, send e-mail to us at scripter@microsoft.com or post them on the Official Scripting Guys Forum. See you tomorrow. Until then, peace.