{"id":2843,"date":"2013-09-20T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2013-09-20T00:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.technet.microsoft.com\/heyscriptingguy\/2013\/09\/20\/hey-dude-where-are-my-methods\/"},"modified":"2013-09-20T00:01:00","modified_gmt":"2013-09-20T00:01:00","slug":"hey-dude-where-are-my-methods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/scripting\/hey-dude-where-are-my-methods\/","title":{"rendered":"Hey, Dude! Where Are My Methods?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Summary<\/strong>: Windows PowerShell MVP, Richard Siddaway, talks about WMI’s missing methods in Windows PowerShell.\nMicrosoft Scripting Guy, Ed Wilson, is here. Today we have a guest blog post by Windows PowerShell MVP, Richard Siddaway.<\/p>\n

Richard has been working with Microsoft technologies for 25 years and has spent time in most  IT roles, including analyst-programmer, server administrator, support, DBA, and architect. He has been interested in automation techniques (including automating job creation and submission on main frames many years ago). He originally used VBScript and WMI since it became available on Windows NT 4.0. Windows PowerShell caught his interest during the early beta versions in 2005. <\/p>\n

Richard blogs extensively about Windows PowerShell and founded the UK Windows PowerShell User Group in 2007. A Windows PowerShell MVP for the last six years, Richard has given numerous talks on Windows PowerShell at various events in the UK, Europe, and the USA. He is frequent speaker for Windows PowerShell User Groups worldwide.<\/p>\n

He has published a number of posts about Windows PowerShell, including expert commentaries on the Microsoft Scripting Games, for which he has been a judge for the last four years. He has written two Windows PowerShell books: Windows PowerShell in Practice (Manning 2010) and Windows PowerShell and WMI (Manning 2012). He then collaborated with Don Jones and Jeff Hicks to write Windows PowerShell in Depth, which was published in 2013. Richard is currently writing an introductory book for Active Directory administrators that features Windows PowerShell.<\/p>\n

Contact information: Richard Siddaway’s Blog<\/a>\nTake it away Richard…\nThanks, Ed.\nWMI has been with us for a long time, and it is one of those technologies that you either love or hate. (Some of us manage both at the same time, but that is another story.) Admins love WMI because it’s so powerful—if I can get a WMI connection to your machine, I can do just about anything to that machine. On the flip side, admins hate WMI because it can be very difficult to use, and finding information can be very difficult.\nWindows PowerShell has had great WMI support, which was enhanced in Windows PowerShell 3.0 by the introduction of the CIM cmdlets and other WMI enhancements. The new functionality has caused some confusion because the WMI class methods, which we have come to rely on, seem to have disappeared.         \nBefore I show you what’s happened to your methods, I need to dive into a little WMI theory.\nThe starting point is that WMI is Microsoft’s implementation of the Common Information Model (CIM). CIM is part of the Web-Based Enterprise Management<\/a> (WBEM) industry standards that are maintained by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). WBEM is defined as “a set of management and Internet standard technologies developed to unify the management of distributed computing environments.”  WBEM standards are designed to be independent of the operating system and hardware. \nWhen you start Windows, the WMI repository is created. The repository consists of a number of things:<\/p>\n