Ever wondered how to create a Winmsd type program to interrogate yours or other systems on the network?

Microsoft has the answer with a technology called WMI or Windows Management Instrumentation.

(WMI is the Microsoft implementation of Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM), which is an industry initiative to develop a standard technology for accessing management information in an enterprise environment.

WMI allows you to retrieve information such as hardware types, software installed and much much more. This is powerful enough on a local system but WMI allows you to interrogate other systems over a network connection. WMI allows you to create an enterprise application to track the status of all your computers on the network.

All the information is provided by the WinMgmt.exe service. When you use this code you are running queries through this service.

Here is the code for Beta2 of .net although it will work on most versions.

//WMI.cs
//Extracts computer system information using WMI from Microsoft
//Written 01/17/02 John O'Donnell - csharpconsulting@hotmail.com
using System;
using System.Management;
namespace WMI
{
/// <summary>
/// Summary description for Class1.
/// </summary>
class Class1
{
static void Main(string[] args)
{
//
// TODO: Add code to start application here
//
Console.WriteLine("Computer details retrieved using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)");
Console.WriteLine("Written 01/17/02 By John O'Donnell - csharpconsulting@hotmail.com");
Console.WriteLine("========================================================================="); ManagementObjectSearcher query1 = new ManagementObjectSearcher("SELECT * FROM Win32_OperatingSystem") ;
ManagementObjectCollection queryCollection1 = query1.Get();
foreach( ManagementObject mo in queryCollection1 )
{
Console.WriteLine("Name : " + mo["name"].ToString());
Console.WriteLine("Version : " + mo["version"].ToString());
Console.WriteLine("Manufacturer : " + mo["Manufacturer"].ToString());
Console.WriteLine("Computer Name : " +mo["csname"].ToString());
Console.WriteLine("Windows Directory : " + mo["WindowsDirectory"].ToString());
}
query1 = new ManagementObjectSearcher("SELECT * FROM Win32_ComputerSystem") ;
queryCollection1 = query1.Get();
foreach( ManagementObject mo in queryCollection1 )
{
Console.WriteLine("Manufacturer : " + mo["manufacturer"].ToString());
Console.WriteLine("Model : " + mo["model"].ToString());
Console.WriteLine(mo["systemtype"].ToString());
Console.WriteLine("Total Physical Memory : " + mo["totalphysicalmemory"].ToString());
}
query1 = new ManagementObjectSearcher("SELECT * FROM Win32_processor") ;
queryCollection1 = query1.Get();
foreach( ManagementObject mo in queryCollection1 )
{
Console.WriteLine(mo["caption"].ToString());
}
query1 = new ManagementObjectSearcher("SELECT * FROM Win32_bios") ;
queryCollection1 = query1.Get();
foreach( ManagementObject mo in queryCollection1 )
{
Console.WriteLine(mo["version"].ToString());
}
query1 = new ManagementObjectSearcher("SELECT * FROM Win32_timezone") ;
queryCollection1 = query1.Get();
foreach( ManagementObject mo in queryCollection1 )
{
Console.WriteLine(mo["caption"].ToString());
}
}
}
}