Does the PowerShell Active Directory call System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement

Question

Does anyone know if the Microsoft PowerShell Active Directory module calls the System.DirectoryServices.AccountManagement .Net namespace? Or if Microsoft have open sourced the module so that I can look myself.

I'm trying to draw out a stack topology and suddenly realised that I don't really know what cmdlets such as Get-ADUser and New-ADUser do internally and what if anything they call (ie how abstracted they are).

Answer 1

It's not exactly the same, but very similar.

Get-ADUser for example, returns a Microsoft.ActiveDirectory.Management.ADUser object. Compare that to UserPrincipal and you'll see they're different, not only in the namespace, but in the properties, etc. However there is still a lot of abstraction going on, and thus overhead.

If you're worried about performance, you can always just use .NET's DirectoryEntry from PowerShell. There are actually type accelerators just for DirectoryEntry and DirectorySearcher .

([adsisearcher]'samaccountname=jaap').FindOne()            #DirectorySearcher
[adsi]'LDAP://CN=Jaap,OU=AdminUsers,DC=JaapBrasser,DC=Com' #DirectoryEntry