WCF Active Directory Helper Service

I've recently started learning the WCF Framework and I have an Active Directory Helper class/library that I've created to house my code for interacting with Active Directory. I'm not sure if I'm reinventing the wheel trying to do this but it seems like it'd be a better implementation to run this Active Directory Helper library as a WCF service within my network and reference that service from any internal application.

My question is, is this something that would be a worthwhile endeavor, is what I'm doing redundant, or is there something else better out there that would already do what I'm looking to implement?

I've found this article in a Google search on this topic:

http://blog.waleedmohamed.net/2009/12/create-active-directory-service-using.html

but it wasn't very intuitive for me to follow along and I don't like the idea of putting domain credentials for something in any config file. Other than that there doesn't seem to be a lot of information on the topic.

Update

The AD Helper library I've developed utilizes the System.DirectoryServices namespace and implements things like:

Instantiate users in ADAM: http://www.koders.com/csharp/fidCD7765F2E9C23683407CEFAFAFB68D3157857BFB.aspx?s=cdef:%22Adam%22#L18

Recursively get all users in a Security Group: http://www.volumeracing.com/blog/?p=129

etc...

My goal is to implement these things as a WCF service over NetTcp so instead of including this AD Helper dll in every project that would want to do these things as well, I can just have my projects call the WCF service. Then if I ever needed to add or u开发者_开发问答pdate the AD Helper dll, I can do so without having to update all my projects that implement the AD Helper dll.

I would check out these things before proceeding:

• What's New in AD DS: Active Directory Web Services
• Active Directory Web Services Overview
• Active Directory Gateway WebService is available for ‘legacy’ OSes
• Introducing the New Active Directory Domain Services in Windows Server 2008 R2

There's a lot going on in this space - however, in most cases, it requires very recent server OS versions (Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2).

I would take a good close look at these offerings from Microsoft, and then decide whether it's worth doing this on your own - or just use this instead.