Other Ways to Access Network Objects

Other Ways to Access Network Objects
LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) was designed for hierarchical object stores that hold long-lived objects. LDAP, or Active Directory, creates such stores for long-lived objects that are of interest in the enterprise, such as users, groups, computers, printers, network shares, services, or any custom object type. LDAP lets us read, write, and search for objects in the stores. Classes in the System.Directory-Services namespace allow the .NET Framework to access objects in the Active Directory or other LDAP data stores.
The System.Management namespace offers classes to access WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) classes. WMI enables management to be performed across the network, such as accessing hardware information, and configuring and administering services that offer WMI providers. WMI can be used to obtain information about hardware, such as free disk space, CPU utilization, performance data, DNS servers, and terminal services configuration.
For more on accessing objects in Active Directory, check out Wrox's 'Data-Centric .NET Programming with C#' (ISBN 1-86100-592-X).