I know there’s a lot of confusion, with some folks, around WMI in PowerShell.<\/P>
For example, this is the first type of WMI usage in PoSH that most folks saw:<\/P>
$wmi = Get-WMIObject Win32_OperatingSystem Cool enough. Of course, in this example, you’re only ever going to get one instance of a WMI class back; with other classes, you might be multiple instances, and so you’d write a little foreach<\/STRONG> loop, perhaps, to spin throught hem all. But then RC2 came out with an all-new way of working with WMI: The WMI type adapter or type accelerator. Now you could do something like this:<\/P> [WMI]’\\\\Server2\\root\\cimv2:Win32_Process.Handle=”0″‘<\/STRONG><\/P> This is a kinda strange-looking syntax if you’re coming from the VBScript world, and it essentially means, “Go to Server2. Connect to the root\\cimv2 WMI namespace, and get the instance of the Win32_Process class where the Handle property is 0.” Using this particular syntax requires you to specify a WMI “query” that returns exactly one instance, not a collection. I’m not a big fan of this syntax, but only because… well, I’m lazy. I know my VBScript syntax, and this ain’t it. I’ll tell you though, I can think of a few times in VBScript where I could have really used a WMI syntax this concise. However, in VBScript I might have executed a query like this:<\/P> SELECT * FROM Win32_Process WHERE Handle = ‘0’<\/STRONG><\/P> And you know what? I can use that in PowerShell, too:<\/P> $process = Get-WMIObject -query “SELECT * FROM Win32_Process WHERE Handle = ‘0’”<\/STRONG><\/P> Of course, in PowerShell it’s easier to run that agains a remote computer:<\/P> $process = Get-WMIObject -query “SELECT * FROM Win32_Process WHERE Handle = ‘0’” -computer Server2<\/STRONG><\/P> A benefit of this technique – using Get-WMIObject, that is – is that the query will always return a collection. In this example, the collection would only have one instance it it, but that’s okay: The fact that it’s a collection means you’ll deal with it the same no matter how many instances it contains.<\/P> So does PowerShell need<\/EM> these different ways of accessing WMI? Well, it doesn’t hurt. You don’t have to learn<\/EM> them all; learn whichever one you like. But if you were to ask the guys writing Exchange Server 2007, or System Center Operations Manager 2007, I bet they love having such flexible access to WMI. <\/P> And you know… I can see the allure. Over time I’ll memorize this syntax the same way I memorized my current VBScript-centric syntax, and I’ll come to wonder how I lived without it.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I know there’s a lot of confusion, with some folks, around WMI in PowerShell.<\/P> For example, this is the first type of WMI usage in PoSH that most folks saw:<\/P> $wmi = Get-WMIObject Win32_OperatingSystem Cool enough. Of course, in this example, you’re only ever going to get one instance of a WMI class back; with other classes, you might …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-windows-powershell"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev.sapien.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
$wmi.ServicePackMajorVersion<\/STRONG><\/P>
$wmi.ServicePackMajorVersion<\/STRONG><\/P>