Active Directory Application Mode

I haven't had much chance to use many of the cool things in Windows 2003 to date, but one of the new things (that incidentally also runs on XP Pro) is a new mode of Active Directory called Application Mode - in total ADAM. I'm finally getting to do some real playing around with this for a large application I've just started working on for a client.

It's basically a standalone active directory that is ideal for storing your own users and roles etc. to be used by your application in an active directory style - even if your company isn't using active directory. If you do go to AD down the road - it's a simple migration for your app. ADAM also acts as an LDAP server as well which makes it a bit more open. You can really put whatever you want into ADAM as it's schema is extensible (not unlike Active Directory). The idea though is that you can have multiple instances of ADAM installed on your server - each containing data specific to a unique application - while AD would store more globally required data throughout the enterprise.

It's pretty typical to store this type of application specific data historically into a SQL database. While that's possible, ADAM - and more specifically the underlying AD is more geared to this type of data. A relational DB remains an ideal choice for transactionally updated data, but ADAM is a great place to store any kind of administrative data that is, for the most part, written to once, and then read frequently by your application.

I'm going to be playing more with this, and specifically doing some performance testing and seeing what kind of improvements can be made by using it in the middle tier, caching some of the data in a wrapper object that is hosted in COM+ and pooled.

As an aside, I find it kind of strange that Whidbey - and specifically the new ASP.NET membership/roles stuff that is built in doesn't use ADAM - but instead opts for the classic database solution. Fortunately the membership/role model in ASP.NET Whidbey is an extensible provider model so I may just take a crack at creating my own provider that uses ADAM.

I should probably google that now as someone has probably already been there and done that.