How to search the Active Directory in Windows XP

A lot of people might be surprised at Windows XP: The Active Directory can be searched in Windows Professional, and this feature has been removed from Windows XP. In fact, although users cannot use this Active Directory search function through the graphical user interface provided by Windows XP, it does exist.

Here's a trick to get users to search the Active Directory through Windows, using a dynamic-link library (DLL) file.

Applications avoid duplicate encoding by using dynamic-link library files. For example, there is an "open" command on almost every program's "File" menu, and when you don't know the file name you want to open, you can also click the "Browse" button to find the file you want on your hard drive or on a network drive.

Although I am not a programmer, I also know that this "browsing" function is based on a DLL file or something similar, so that different programs can easily invoke this function. If that's not the case, if someone wants to write a windows-based application and include the "File Open" feature, then he has to write the code for browsing the file himself. In this case, you may see that a lot of low-end programs are removing this functionality because the code is too cumbersome to write. In fact, applications that have the browse feature selected can be implemented uniformly because they use shared code that is encapsulated in DLL files.

Back to our topic, what is the DLL file doing to help us search the Active Directory? You know, many applications need to search the Active Directory. In Windows XP, the function of Active Directory search is encapsulated in a DLL file. As long as these DLL files are available, users can be allowed to perform query and search functions on the Active Directory.

You can do this through another operating system component called RUNDLL32.EXE. Note that although many modules and many code are included, the DLL file itself is not an executable file. Only through RUNDLL32.EXE, a helper application, can you execute a DLL file. More precisely, you are not actually executing a DLL file, but rather executing some functions in the DLL file. Most DLL files contain more than one function, so you should specify the specific function name you want to perform at execution time.

Now that you know how the DLL works, let's take a look at how the corresponding commands and arguments should be written when you want to start an Active Directory query. Note that the following commands are case-sensitive:

rundll32 Dsquery,openquerywindow

Dsqiery is the name of a DLL file, and Openquerywindow is the name of the function you call. As the name suggests, after executing this command, the system opens a window where you can have different objects in the Active Directory.

Although we usually use "run" to execute this command, you can also make it a batch file, and then create a desktop shortcut for the batch file. This allows you to perform a query operation on the Active Directory simply by double-clicking the mouse.