In our previous ADSI articles we have been setting up some basics on how to use System.DirectoryServices namespace to get some information from Active Directory. We used LDAP provider to extract the information. But that is not the only provider that can be used with DirectoryServices classes. The DirectoryEntry class can be used with other providers like WinNT, IIS and Novel Netware(NDS, NWCOMPAT).

In this article we will demonstrate how IIS provider can be used to get complete list of web applications in IIS.

How To Do It

The procedure to accomplish is different from the one used for enumeration of Active Directory Users and Groups. The reason is the DirectorySearcher class can only be used with LDAP provider. This means that we don't have the luxury of specifying SearchFilter and invoke the search. Now the work is accomlished by DirectoryEntry class. You will specify the ADsPath for the web server and the object you are looking for and then call Children property to get the list of children items.

A general ADsPath can be specified as IIS://MachineName/W3SVC/N/Root. When we specify this path, it returns list of all IIsWebVirtualDir and IIsWebDirectory containers. Since we are only interested in the web applications, check SchemaClassName value for each child DirectoryEntry object returned by Children property. The objects whose class name matches "IIsWebDirectory" is added to the StringCollection for later display.

public StringCollection GetIISVirtualFolders(string strServer)
{
	StringCollection strColl = null;
	DirectoryEntry obDirEntry = null;
	DirectoryEntries obDirEntList = null;
	try
	{
		obDirEntry = new DirectoryEntry("IIS://" + strServer + "/W3svc/1/Root");
		obDirEntList= obDirEntry.Children;

		// Process each child entry and add the name of virtual folder
		// to string collection.
		strColl = new StringCollection();
		foreach(DirectoryEntry objChildDE in obDirEntList)
		{
			ProcessDEForIISVFolder(objChildDE, strColl);
		}
	}
	catch (Exception ex)
	{
		Trace.Write(ex.Message);
		return null;
	}
	return strColl;
}

private void ProcessDEForIISVFolder(DirectoryEntry ob, StringCollection strColl)
{
	try
	{
		// Check if the schema class is IIsWebVirtualDir or not.
		if (0 == String.Compare( ob.SchemaClassName, "IIsWebDirectory"))
		{
			strColl.Add(ob.Name);
		}
	}
	catch (Exception ex)
	{
		Trace.WriteLine(ex.Message);
	}
}
									

Platforms Tested

• Windows 2000 Adv. Server
• Windows XP Professional
• Windows .NET Enterprise Server (Beta 3)

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