Chapter 6: A Look into the Future of WMI Scripting

Overview

Discussing the future of any technology is always a challenge, since so many things may change between the moment you write down where you think the technology will go and the time you see the final implementation. However, by looking at what we have today and the way Microsoft analyzes the feedback it has received from customers, we can arrive at some "best guesses."

The current scripting infrastructure, implemented by WSH 5.6, is powerful enough to perform most tasks required by administrators. Leveraging the WSH 5.6 infrastructure via various COM object models, such as ADSI and WMI, to gain access to the system settings and monitoring provides administrators with a powerful set of tools. However, learning these technologies is not particularly easy for administrators, especially for those who do not want to be programmers. As explained in the WMI examples in this book, you need to know, understand, and master many interfaces and other components to harness all the power offered by the WSH/WMI combination. More specifically, to play with WMI, you must learn:

• The CIM repository mechanisms, to understand their organization and how to get access to the classes representing real-world manageable entities.

• The WMI providers capabilities, since they determine the classes capabilities (i.e., update, enumeration, events).

• The classes contained in the CIM repository, since they represent the template of the real-world manageable entities.

• The WMI COM object model or the .NET Framework classes, to understand how to get access to the management data from a coded logic in a script or a C# program.

• A scripting or programming language (i.e., VBScript, JSCript, VB.NET, C#), to create the core logic of the tasks (i.e., structure, loops, statements, etc.).

If you look at these technologies from a high-level perspective, you realize that you must understand and master a large number of concepts and technologies to effectively script on top of WMI. Actually, this is the root of many of the new ideas, and where the foundation for the future of the Windows management layers may come from, since Microsoft wants to simplify the amount of knowledge required to work with the management data available on the Windows platforms.