We have a deployment system at my office where we can automatically deploy a given build of our code to a specified dev environment (dev01, dev02, etc.).
These dev environments are generalized virtual machines, so our system has to configure them automatically. We have a new system requirement with our next version; we need to give certain user accounts read/write access to certain folders (specifically, giving the ASPNET user read/write to a logging folder).
I’m pretty sure we could do this with WMI or scripts (we use Sysinternals PSTools in a few places for deployment), but I’m not sure what is the best way to do it. The deployment system is written in C# 2.0, the dev environment is a VM with Windows XP. The VM is on the same domain as the deployment system and I have administrator access.
Edit: There’s not really a right answer for this, so I’m hesitant to mark an answer as accepted.
Another option would be to investigate using a Powershell script There are a lot powershell community snap ins to support VMs and active directory.
Active Directory Script Rescources
Powershell Script Library
Microsoft Script Resources
VMWARE VI Toolkit (for Windows)