I can add a property just fine, but I can't 'Edit'

Here is my dilemma. Our company has three levels of user - Exec, Staff, and Nonperson (i.e. an account that represents a role and not an individual - such as 'administrator'). Currently this information is in nested groups - i.e. there is an 'Exec' group that contains 'ny-exec' and 'la-exec', etc. I wrote a script that set the 'employeeType' attribute for members of one of these groups. This code worked fine, here is a snippet:

Dim type As String = IIf(exec.Checked, "Executive", "Staff")
Dim individual As DirectoryEntry = root
'Root is the person's DE from a higher level function


individual.AuthenticationType = AuthenticationTypes.Secure


'user and pass are valid for an administrator of the domain
individual.Username = user
individual.Password = pass


individual.Properties("employeeType").Add(type)

The employeeType attribute gets set properly However, when I try to update this feature, by replacing the bolded line above with:

individual.Properties("employeeType").value=type

I get the following error:The Active Directory datatype cannot be converted to/from a native DS datatype Anyone have any advice?

Re: I can add a property just fine, but I can't 'Edit'

Not sure what you are passing in for the 'type' variable in your code. The attribute 'employeeType' is of Unicode String, so make sure you are passing a string there. Instead of setting the .Value, try the following and it should fix it for you:

if(individual.Properties.Contains("employeeType"))
{
     individual.Properties("employeeType")(0) = type
}