I've been playing with PowerShell's WMI interface as part of some writing work I'm doing. As I see it, PowerShell lacks built-in cmdlets to do everything. However that really is not a problem since a lot of thing can be pretty easily achieved using a few lines of PowerShell!
PowerShell introduces the concept of type accelerators. These look like normal .NET types (type name specified inside square brackets), but they are managed by PowerShell itself. Type accelerators are just shortcuts to existing underlying functionality.
There are three WMI related type accelerators in PowerShell V1. If you are using WMI with PowerShell, you really should know these three:
- [WMI] - this TA helps you to get directly to a particular WMI object. You provide a string containing a detailed path to a particular WMI object and the TA returns the object. This is a little easier than using Get-WMIObject in those cases when you actually know the details of which occurrence you want.
- [WMICLASS] - this TA gets you to a class definition. This then enables you to access WMI Class static methods. The Get-WMIObject enables you to get to instances, but to create new instances you need access to the static methods of the class.
- [WMISEARCHER] - this TA helps you in terms of querying. When creating a WMISEARCHER, you specify a WQL query (e.g. Select * FROM Win32_Process WHERE Handlecount > 1000). You can use the searcher to execute that query and return results. This is a little easer for some times of administration.
WMI Type Accelerators are not well defined or well documented either on MSDN or inside the product itself. I hope my attempts at providing this information are useful - let me know what I'm missing and I'll try to add it. Over the coming week or so, I'll be blogging about each type accelerator in more detail. The posts also contain some simple sample code that demonstrates these cool features.
Did I mention - PowerShell rocks!!!
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