Microsoft® Windows® Scripting with WMI: Self-Paced Learning Guide

Chapter 1: Introducing WMI 21

Keep two things in mind regarding providers and objects. First, without a provider, you can-

not access the properties of classes. In fact, without a provider, the class it supplies is either

nonexistent or is inaccessible. Providers provide classes. In many respects it really is that sim-

ple. As mentioned earlier, you do not directly use a provider; rather, you use the provider indi-

rectly through the supplied classes. At times, data is available in different formats, so the

advantage of using a class that is supported by one of the special providers is that they make

the data easier to consume. This is the case when you read performance data, as discussed ear-

lier when I mentioned raw and cooked data. In ot ...