1.1 Objective

During the initial WMI discovery to illustrate the scripting technique, we used a very few number of classes from the CIM repository (see the first book about WMI, Understanding WMI Scripting ). Mostly, we worked with the Win32_Service class, Win32_WMISetting, and Win32_NTLogEvent classes. We also examined the WMI event model and worked with some specific event classes. The standard WMI installation includes more than 600 classes that expose more than 3,000 properties. As we can see, we are a long way from completing our WMI discovery! Classes representing manageable entities of the real world have a direct relation with the WMI providers registered in the CIM repository. Although the Microsoft Platform SDK documents most of the WMI providers available, we discuss here how to retrieve information about the WMI providers and the class they support by extracting information from the CIM repository. This information will serve as the basis for subsequent chapters when discovering the most important WMI providers available with their classes and capabilities.

1.2 The WMI provider types

A WMI provider registered in the CIM repository is an instance of the _ Win32Provider system class. Basically, the _ Win32Provider system class registers information about a provider's physical implementation with WMI. So, requesting all instances of the _ Win32Provider system class in a particular WMI namespace will list all registered providers in that particular namespace.

During the WMI discovery, we saw that a set of system classes is available to...