LINQ to LDAP: Closer to Home

During my experience with passwords I was working directly with an LdapConnection. After a while I wondered how easy it would be to add extension methods directly to the LdapConnection. It was actually pretty easy so all of the methods that don't rely on object mappings are now available from an LdapConnection object now.

LINQ to LDAP: How do passwords work?

A couple hours of trial and error I have finally figured out setting passwords in Active Directory and Lightweight Directory Services. As a result of this I ported all of the dynamic functionality to some extension methods for LdapConnection.

Modifying passwords has been in the back of my head ever since the question was asked here. If I had looked closer at the answer on StackOverflow I would have seen that the solution was for Sun-One. If there's one thing I've learned working on LINQ to LDAP it's that every server has been implemented a little differently.

So let's get down to it. The first thing I learned is userPassword in AD LDS is not the "real" password attribute. That would be unicodePwd. I then received a very helpful "An operation error occurred." A few searches later and I found out that means you'll have to use port 636 instead of 389. Turns out Microsoft does not allow changing the password over a non SSL connection. However, you don't have to explicitly set SSL to true if you're post Windows 2000 (I hope you are). Okie dokie let's fire this up.

"The LDAP server is unavailable."

You'll get this error if SSL is not on for your server. This lead me to generating a self signed certificate and installing it for my local instance. You can read about the how and why here. Alright, now my server is responding to requests on 636, but I'm getting "A value in the request is invalid." That's when I found this post explaining how to do this the right way. I wish I had found that first. So here's the resulting code:



For those using AD LDS and you don't have SSL on, let me save you some trouble. I found this post later allowing you to enable modifying the password over port 389. Well I hope this was helpful.

update
I should probably add that you should not enable setting passwords over an unencrypted connection. I am working in a test environment so it's no big deal for me.

LINQ to LDAP: Documentation

Just a minor update. 3.0 is coming. I'm currently reviewing and updating the documentation over at CodePlex. I realized that I haven't touched it since sometime around 1.5 / 2.0 so it's in dire need of a refresh. There are a few things from 3.0 in there so don't download 2.5 and scream "WTF, this is all wrong!" :).

Stop Checking CanExecute!

I stumbled upon an interesting problem in WPF. I've only seen a few rumblings about it on the internet so it may just be me doing something stupid. I can reproduce it so that's enough for me to look into it.

It's a common setup. There's a view model that manages workspaces (tabs, windows, whatever) similar to Josh Smith's example. However, when removing a view model from the ObservableCollection my view continues to poll the CanExecute of the commands it's bound too. No big deal, just set them to null and raise property changed and problem solved. Well what happens if you just want to unbind your current view and rebind to a new view? The view model has all the state in MVVM after all.

You could have some sort of unbind implementation on your workspaces that will null your commands and reinitialize them (bleh). The simplest option I've found is to set DataContext to null on your view when it unloads.

You can then just inherit from this control and call it a day.

Here's a project demonstrating the problem.