Chapter 10: Management Instrumentation

Overview

In this chapter we are going to investigate how you can use managed code to interact with the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) services. The chapter will cover:

• WMI architecture

• What kinds of features you can access using WMI

• Coding with the System.Management classes to write WMI clients

• Synchronous and asynchronous requests

• WMI Events

WMI has to be one of the most undersold technologies that's emerged over the last few years. It is incredibly powerful and relatively simple to use, but despite this has never really attracted much publicity, and so is still used by relatively few developers. Because of that, much of the focus of this chapter will be on understanding the principles behind WMI itself, as well as on the techniques for leveraging WMI from managed code.