Developing WMI Solutions: A Guide to Windows Management Instrumentation (Addison-Wesley Microsoft Technology Series) (Paperback)

by Craig Tunstall (Author), Gwyn Cole (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
This book helps developers and system administrators understand Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). For the first time the Windows Operating System employs a unified technology to represent software and hardware management. The power of WMI in systems management stretches to virtually every piece of software and hardware. So regardless of whether you’re a team leader, software engineer or system administrator, WMI will probably affect you.

After the introduction, the book starts covering where management technologies/frameworks were (SNMP and DMI) and roughly how they worked and the differences between them. This leads to the reasons why the Desktop Management Task Force (DMTF) defined a protocol/schema called WBEM (Web Based Enterprise Management). Microsoft adopted WBEM and WMI was born. WMI is an implementation of the WBEM standard and it is also consistent with Microsoft's Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) initiative. The book continues to explain how to understand the various class schemas and the WMI tools provided by Microsoft. The class schemas describe virtually every aspect of a network, computer and its operating system together with the installed software. The book then introduces how WMI fits together with all its different building blocks.

From a development point of view, the most important place to start in making your own software/hardware manageable through a standard management environment is learning how to develop a class schema. The book takes a whole two chapters to discuss how to do this.

Accessing the WMI management environment can be achieved a number of ways. The book covers how system administrators can develop script to access and manipulate the management environment. The next part of the book is then focused on how developers can use and access the management environment through both the C++/COM interface and the .net framework. A chapter is also included how application developers can develop their UI management tools for the Microsoft Management Console (MMC). A crucial chapter in the book describes how software and hardware developers can write their own WMI providers. WMI providers are the gateway for developers to expose their own class schema.

Finally, the book covers a very little-known subject of the WMI toolset called Event Tracing. Event Tracing is a very powerful and high performance method of instrumenting applications. It allows applications to expose very detailed information about an operation or task. The operating system uses this technology to expose activity in the Windows kernel, security subsystems and numerous other subsystems.

From the Author
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.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 816 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional (November 22, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201616130
• ISBN-13: 978-0201616132
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #356,598 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars At last! Something for overworked sysadmins, January 4, 2003

By	W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

A significant component of the Total Cost of Ownership of a network of personal computers is due to the myriad different pieces of hardware and software that these can contain; invariably from a slew of vendors. Integrating and managing the totality can be quite labour intensive for the systems administrator. Also too for the developer; whether she is writing the interface for a piece of software that others will use or if she is on the other side, and has to write code that runs that package and others.

Accordingly, Microsoft has pushed forward Windows Management Instrumentation. The book describes how to use WMI straightforwardly. You do need to know C++, COM and Active Template Library. No surprise there. Several sections also describe using the still new C# and .NET to write OO applications that easily connect to WMI. If you have not used C# and .NET, the book's coverage is concise enough to get you started. The authors treat a minimal subset that is enough for you to do useful work vis-a-vis WMI.

On the scripting aspect, the authors rightly give this careful coverage. Scripting files may not have the sexy appeal of a GUI-driven methodology. But in fact, for automated systems administration of many machines, they are usually far more important. Veterans of DOS and Unix batch file writing will see much of familiar approaches here.

Part of Microsoft's incentive for promoting WMI is to help it stay ahead of linux. The basic functionality of a browser and Microsoft Office are already in various linux applications. So at least in the network sphere, WMI helps Microsoft hold off linux. The authors do not discuss this, but if you read this book, you should keep it in mind; in the broader context of where the PC market is going.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent For .NET Developers, October 12, 2004

By	Jase T. Wolfe - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

On the back cover, one bolded line sums up this book nicely: "...[this title explains] how easy it is to write powerful management applications thru WMI on the .NET platform". If you are an experienced enterprise application developer working on the .NET platform and interested in what WMI can do to replace legacy solutions such as SNMP, this book is an excellent choice. Just enough attention is given to the history of WBEM, the overview of the WMI/CIM environment, the elements of the SDK, and the query methodologies of WMI, before spending the remainder of the book creating a solution to an example scenario, that anyone ready to "take the plunge" will not be disappointed.

Another quote on the back cover, as well as within the introduction section, states that "...[this book] is an essential companion for network administrators, software developers and team leaders looking to become proficient with WMI". Well, one third of that is true. I can't image what network administrator would find this title beneficial, as network administrators leverage WMI in automation and data gathering scripts or within applications such as SMS 2003. This title is not only not a traditional reference for the individual elements of WMI, nowhere in the title does it even cover the scriptable aspects of WMI. As for team leaders, if the team leader needs and introduction and administrative overview of what WMI is and what WMI's capabilities are, again, this is not the right title. For those two users I would recommend starting with Microsoft's free on-line WMI Scripting Primer (Microsoft Windows 2000 Scripting Guide) as it is straightforward, uncomplicated, and easy to understand.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best WMI book I have seen, June 13, 2005

By	coffee_fan (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews

I am now on chapter 5, but this book really takes the reader by the hand into the world of WMI.

Chapter 2 covers previous management technologies like SNMP and DMI.

Chapter 3 describes WMI, its motivation and details about its implementation that are absent from any Microsoft documentation yet. Note that MSDN lately revamped its documentation, so it is much better now.

Chapter 4 does a tour of the CIM model and the tools the Microsoft WMI SDK provides. This is a nice tutorial for developers.

Chapter 5 introduces the user to the creation of CIM class schemas. The CIM model presented is a bit outdated as the DMTF CIM model is constantly changing. The reader should be aware of this in order to prevent confusion.

Overall, the book is very educational and still of very good value.

When I finish the book I will update my review.