Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)

WMI Technology

Before investigating the structure of WMI and thinking about how a system administrator can put it to use, it is worth spending a few moments considering some of the technologies that have led to the development of WMI and its scriptable interface.

Perhaps the single most important development has been the widespread adoption of the object-oriented programming model over the last decade. Before object orientation, a program consisted of two things: data and procedures. Data were inanimate blocks of information; procedures were blocks of code that read, wrote, and generally manipulated the data. Imagine, for example, a simple and completely useless program that lists several types of food and then outputs the phrase “this food ...