Chapter 2: The Win32 Providers

2.1 Objective

Due to the huge number of classes, it is impossible to review all classes available from WMI, but we focus by category on the most important one. As before, we learn by practice and see how each interesting class can be used in a script. Because the Win32 providers support a large number of classes, we start our discovery with these providers. In the next chapters we focus on the classes supported by other WMI providers available under Windows Server 2003 and methodically review their capabilities with their supported set of classes used in a script.

Due to the number of classes supported by the Win32 providers, this chapter is divided into two sections: one section focusing on the Win32 class related to the computer system hardware and a second section focusing on the Win32 classes related to operating systems. All classes are organized by category in a way very similar to the Microsoft Platform SDK organization. For instance, we have a category for the "Video and Monitor" classes, a category for the "Printing devices" classes, and a category for the "Networking devices" classes. In this chapter, we cover more than 20 categories. Let's start the Win32 providers discovery with their classes.