Chapter 12. Developing WMI Providers

One of the most powerful features of Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) is that it allows developers to expose their own management objects through a provider. WMI offers a lot of infrastructure that makes writing providers reasonably straightforward. Let's look at the big picture of current approaches used by developers to expose their management interfaces.

If you're a developer of a client-side project, then it's likely that you don't have any facility to manage and monitor the software. Managing and monitoring client applications is sometimes viewed as more of a problem than managing and monitoring server-side applications. Microsoft has already led the way by making Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer expose management objects. Microsoft Office exposes more than 100 classes (in the root\MSAPPS10 namespace) and Internet Explorer exposes around ten classes (in the root\CIMV2\Applications\MicrosoftIE namespace). This allows administrators to remotely monitor and manage large numbers of client machines in the network.