I installed ADLDS to my development machine in hopes to be able to test authentication from .NET code without having to have a separate machine (or even VM) running Active Directory. Everything went well until I tried to add a user to the "domain". Here's what I have done so far:
FIRST: Installed Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services (AD LDS) for Windows7, checking all the boxes for the classes and modules (sorry, can't remember exactly what that wizard step was talking about). As a result, I'm able to connect to my domain controller using the newly-installed tool "Active Directory Sites and Services":
NEXT: Installed Remote Server Administration Tools for Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 (SP1).
THEN: Ran the "Active Directory Users and Computers" snap-in and tried to connect to my local machine as the "Domain Controller". When I did that, here's what I got:
But, then when I clicked OK to view the users in the domain, I got...
I understand that ADLDS stands up a lightweight Domain Controller... is it so lightweight that I can't even add users for testing authentication? Is there something I can do or add to this instance to make users possible in ADLDS?
"Having lighter-weight systems to test against in a development environment is pretty important to developing software."
- I'd argue that having a test configuration that is analogous to a production configuration is much more important...