I’ve tinkered with WMI in the past, usually to find some IIS, network, or process information on remote machines where there wasn’t a readily-available API. I realize as the world of .Net APIs expand, the need for WMI shrinks, but it’s still an underlying technology that lets you do “magic” when there appears to be no other way.
However, the problem I’ve often had with WMI is finding the exact query to run. To my knowledge, it didn’t have intellisence, and I never clicked with the reference manual. I recently found a tool that makes it easy to generate WMI snippets – the free WMI Code Creator v1.0. Yes, this tool is from 2005, yes that means I am absolutely no WMI guru, but I still wanted to pass it along.
The tool provides a GUI to select the various namespaces and classes from which to construct your WMI query, and then lets you select the properties (“columns”) to return. Then, it lets you execute the code on the fly. The tool just worked. Here’s a snippet of what it returns for querying process information.
using System;
using System.Management;
try
{
ManagementObjectSearcher searcher =
new ManagementObjectSearcher("root\\CIMV2",
"SELECT * FROM Win32_Processor");
foreach (ManagementObject queryObj in searcher.Get())
{
Console.WriteLine("-----------------------------------");
Console.WriteLine("Win32_Processor instance");
Console.WriteLine("-----------------------------------");
Console.WriteLine("Family: {0}", queryObj["Family"]);
Console.WriteLine("ProcessorId: {0}", queryObj["ProcessorId"]);
Console.WriteLine("ProcessorType: {0}", queryObj["ProcessorType"]);
}
}
catch (ManagementException e)
{
MessageBox.Show("An error occurred while querying for WMI data: " + e.Message);
}
