### Use of This Guide

Before reading this guide, you should read the Introduction to OSF DCE. It contains overviews, along with illustrations, of all the DCE components and of DCE as a whole. Many concepts and details are explained in the Introduction to OSF DCE that are necessary to a full understanding of what is described here. Next, read this topic in its entirety.

Determine whether you will be programming primarily in the CDS namespace or the GDS namespace and read Part 2 or Part 3 accordingly. At this point, you are ready to begin programming and should proceed to Part 4. The main purpose of Part 4 is to provide a convenient location to look up the details of object values and structures needed when writing code.

If you do not find the information you need in either this guide or the OSF DCE Application Development Reference , see the OSF DCE Administration Guide and the OSF DCE Command Reference . For example, information about the CDS as a separate component is found in the OSF DCE Administration Guide. Although the DCE Security Service is documented in the OSF DCE Application Development Guide, some information of interest to programmers (such as adding new principals to the registry database) is also found in the OSF DCE Administration Guide.

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