Just a quick example of how you can use the System.DirectoryServices.DirectorySearcher class to find deleted objects (that have not yet reached the tombstone time limit) in your Active Directory domain.
This basic example will just find deleted computer objects and show the name of each computer in a messagebox:
Dim Searcher As New DirectorySearcher(New DirectoryEntry())
'Set our search properties to find Tombstoned objects
Searcher.PageSize = 1000
Searcher.Tombstone = True
'Set the search filter to only find deleted computer objects
Searcher.Filter = ("(&(isDeleted=TRUE)(objectClass=computer))")
'Loop through the results and show each deleted object's name
For Each DeletedObject As SearchResult In Searcher.FindAll
MessageBox.Show(DeletedObject.Properties("name")(0).ToString)
Next
Hopefully its fairly obvious what you need to change if you wanted to search for user accounts instead of computer accounts.
As deleted objects do not have all of the normal attributes that they would have if they were ‘alive’ there is only a very limited amount of information that you can get from these objects, but it can still be useful in some situations. If you want to see all of the attributes (and their values) that are available for each deleted object, you could use something like this – the example below again only finds computer accounts:
Dim Searcher As New DirectorySearcher(New DirectoryEntry())
'Set our search properties to find Tombstoned objects
Searcher.PageSize = 1000
Searcher.Tombstone = True
'Set the search filter to only find deleted computer objects
Searcher.Filter = ("(&(isDeleted=TRUE)(objectClass=computer))")
'Loop through the results and show every available property for each deleted object
For Each DeletedObject As SearchResult In Searcher.FindAll
Dim ResultString As String = String.Empty
For Each Propertyname As String In DeletedObject.Properties.PropertyNames
For i As Integer = 0 To DeletedObject.Properties(Propertyname).Count – 1
ResultString &= Propertyname & " = " & DeletedObject.Properties(Propertyname)(i).ToString & vbNewLine
Next
Next
MessageBox.Show(ResultString)
Next
Hope that helps someone out in the future 🙂
Chris
Cjwdev 