Developing WMI Solutions: A Guide to Windows Management Instrumentation
Many applications written for Windows currently don’t harness the power of a systems management technology (like WMI); this is what drove us to write this book. We want developers to realize that making an application manageable is a key benefit, especially to system administrators. Once system administrators and IT support departments realize what can be done with WMI, they will start demanding that applications expose WMI management interfaces. Not only will system administrators by happy, but you’ll be able to harvest a wealth of information available from WMI when building your own management applications. The other side of the coin apart from making an application manageable is a ‘management application’. A management application is a program (like an MMC snap-in) or web interface that can interact with the system to gather, inspect and manipulate the systems functionality or configuration. We also want system administrators to realize what they can do in !a system equipped with a technology like WMI and how they should go about automating routine tasks. For instance, a system administrator can easily write a script that will identify what Windows service packs have been installed on all the machines in the network.