I am receiving an unusual behaviour in my asp.net application. I have code that uses Directory Services to find the AD groups for a given, authenticated user. The code goes something like ...

string username = "user"; string domain = "LDAP://DC=domain,DC=com"; DirectorySearcher search = new DirectorySearcher(domain); search.Filter = "(SAMAccountName=" + username + ")"; And then I query and get the list of groups for the given user. The problem is that the code was receiving the list of groups as a list of strings. With our latest release of the software, we are starting to receive the list of groups as a byte[].

The system will return string, suddenly return byte[] and then with a reboot it returns string again.

Anyone have any ideas?

code sample:

DirectoryEntry dirEntry = new DirectoryEntry("LDAP://" + ldapSearchBase);  
DirectorySearcher userSearcher = new DirectorySearcher(dirEntry)  
  { SearchScope = SearchScope.Subtree,  
    CacheResults = false,  
    Filter = ("(" + txtLdapSearchNameFilter.Text + "=" + userName + ")") 
  };  

userResult = userSearcher.FindOne();  
ResultPropertyValueCollection valCol = userResult.Properties["memberOf"];  

foreach (object val in valCol)  
{  
    if (val is string)  
    { 
        distName = val.ToString(); 
    }  
    else  
    {  
        distName = enc.GetString((Byte[])val);  
    } 
 }