Skip to Main Content
Windows Server Cookbook
book

Windows Server Cookbook

by Robbie Allen
March 2005
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
698 pages
19h 13m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Windows Server Cookbook

Appendix B. Introduction to WMI

The Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) API was developed by Microsoft in 1998 in response to developers’ and system administrators’ ever growing need for a common, scriptable API to manage the components of the Windows operating system. Before WMI, if you wanted to manage some component of the operating system, you had to resort to using one of the component-specific Win32 APIs, such as the Registry API or the Event Log API. Each API typically had its own implementation quirks and required way too much work to do simple tasks. The other big problem with the Win32 APIs was that scripting languages, such as VBScript, could not access them. This limited how much an inexperienced programmer or system administrator could programmatically manage systems. WMI changes all this by providing a single API that can be used to query and manage the Event Log, the Registry, system processes, the file system, and almost any other operating system component.

The WMI architecture relies heavily upon the concept of providers. These providers gather and supply information to the underlying objects being queried. Depending on the WMI information you are trying to retrieve, WMI will contact the specific provider that can retrieve the information (e.g., SNMP or the Registry).

WMI is installed as part of the following operating systems: Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 2000 Server, Windows XP, and Windows 2003 server. WMI is available as an installable option on Windows ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Windows 10 Troubleshooting

Windows 10 Troubleshooting

Mike Halsey
Windows® Sysinternals Administrator’s Reference

Windows® Sysinternals Administrator’s Reference

Mark E. Russinovich and Aaron Margosis
Windows Server® 2012 Unleashed

Windows Server® 2012 Unleashed

Rand Morimoto, Michael Noel, Guy Yardeni, Omar Droubi, Andrew Abbate, Chris Amaris

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596006330Errata Page