Search an entire Active Directory forest with C#
Automated Server Documentation I've recently seen a few posts on how to search an entire Active Directory forest using the .NET DirectorySearcher in C#. I was a little confused as some people were enumerating the domains and I thought it would be quicker to query the Global Catalog. The Global Catalog (GC) has limited information on all objects in the directory Forest. I constructed the DirectorySearcher like this new DirectorySearcher( "GC://myforest.int" ); However was surprised to find it only return results from the local domain. It turns out you need to construct the DirectorySearcher using a DirectoryEntry rather than a string directly... strange. Anyway the following code will find all objects with a samAccountName property in the entire forest. String ForestGC = String .Format( "GC://{0}" , Forest .GetCurrentForest().Name); DirectorySearcher Searcher = new DirectorySearcher ( new DirectoryEntry (ForestGC)); Searcher.Filter = &quo