Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)
Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) provides access to information about objects in a managed environment. Through WMI and the WMI application programming interface (API), applications can query for and make changes to static information in the Common Information Model (CIM) repository and dynamic information maintained by the various types of providers.
What that actually means it that one can get information about the computer and operating system or subscribe to global events. I've already added a
SystemManagement object to the Siderite library, but it is only a wrapper for a few lines of code that are easy to do anyway.
Cool things that WMI can help you with:
- Enumerate harddrives, networkcards, PCI slots, operating system information, processors, processes, registry keys, security policies, windows start menu items, etc. and their properties (physical memory size, processor ID, etc)
- Subscribe to events like "a specific registry key has been changed" or "a new process started/ended" or "windows is shutting down".
It is also interesting that this can be done to a remote system as well, just like the Windows Task Manager which uses WMI to get and display all information and can connect to another computer.
It seems that the NET framework comes with some nice command line utilities. One of them is MgmtClassGen.exe.
Basically what you do is:
MgmtClassGen.exe /P
And it creates a strong typed wrapper for the WMI class.
Example:
MgmtClassGen Win32_Processor /P processor.cs
creates a Processor class that controls everything about the processor.
For a complete list of WMI classes check out:
Computer System Hardware Classes
What that actually means it that one can get information about the computer and operating system or subscribe to global events. I've already added a
SystemManagement object to the Siderite library, but it is only a wrapper for a few lines of code that are easy to do anyway.
Cool things that WMI can help you with:
- Enumerate harddrives, networkcards, PCI slots, operating system information, processors, processes, registry keys, security policies, windows start menu items, etc. and their properties (physical memory size, processor ID, etc)
- Subscribe to events like "a specific registry key has been changed" or "a new process started/ended" or "windows is shutting down".
It is also interesting that this can be done to a remote system as well, just like the Windows Task Manager which uses WMI to get and display all information and can connect to another computer.
It seems that the NET framework comes with some nice command line utilities. One of them is MgmtClassGen.exe.
Basically what you do is:
MgmtClassGen.exe
And it creates a strong typed wrapper for the WMI class.
Example:
MgmtClassGen Win32_Processor /P processor.cs
creates a Processor class that controls everything about the processor.
For a complete list of WMI classes check out:
Computer System Hardware Classes
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