Good resources to learn WMI in .NET?

Question

I'm looking for recommendations for good resources are there out there to learn WMI. Interested in all types; books, online, webcasts, etc.

Answer 1

Well, there is of course the MSDN library documentation for Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa394582(VS.85).aspx.

WMI is apparently accessible from PowerShell, using the Get-WMIObject cmdlet, according to community content posted at the above link.

Note that WMI is historically accessed through vbscript, COM, and other "older" technologies. If you are developing in .NET, you might have better luck with these namespaces:

System.Management 
System.Management.Instrumentation

There is more info about these namespaces at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms257340(VS.80).aspx.

There are a handful of books on Amazon about WMI; the best one appears to be "Developing WMI Solutions: A Guide to Windows Management Instrumentation" published by Addison Wesley.

Answer 2

Look into the "WMI Explorer" from the PowerShell guy. Nice tool for interactive exploration of WMI namespaces.

Answer 3

Other nifty tool is WMI Code Creator. AAARRRGH I can't post links yet. Go to Google, search for

"wmi code creator" site:www.microsoft.com

It's the first link. You can explore the namespaces and classes and the tool creates the code for you to execute the methods or make the queries, in VB, VBScript, or C#.