Improved WMI experience in PowerShell 3.0

PowerShell Team

There is a famous quote often attributed to Jeffrey Snover, “IT Pros love and hate WMI. They love it because there is so much great stuff there. They hate it because it is complex to use”. Not to our surprise, most of the IT Pros and developers we talked to agree with this.

This is going to change with Windows “8”. We listened to your feedback and have made heavy investment in this area. This blog post standards based management in Windows Server 8 by Jeffrey Snover and Wojtek Kozaczynski provides an excellent overview. I would like to highlight two important aspect of improved PS+WMI integration that Wojtek talked about..

–   CIM Cmdlets:  PowerShell cmdlets to manage Standard Compliant CIM capable systems. Now you can manage any CIM+WSMan compliant system using the same set of cmdlets shipping with PowerShell 3.0. Imagine managing a hardware device or a non-Windows server from PowerShell, just like you would manage Windows.

–   CIM-Based Cmdlets: PowerShell cmdlets written as a CIM Provider. For many IT Pros, terms like CIM operations, namespace, associations seemed to be way too complex, and many of them get nightmare about not getting WQL right. We heard the shout loud and clear. We are giving WMI developer right infrastructure and API to write cmdlets in native code, complete with PS semantics like verbose, warning, whatif/confirm etc. Out of the box, Windows “8” ships with a large number of new cmdlets that have been implemented as a WMI provider.

Our goal in PowerShell 3.0 is to provide  ‘first-class’  experience for WMI. In the next few weeks, we will take you through a deep dive providing details of these investments . Stay tuned.

– Osama Sajid

Program Manager, WMI

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