There is one last WMI accelerator to look at – [WMI] – which is an accelerator for System.Management.ManagementObject.  This is the same object type that Get-WMIObject returns. [WMI] gets an object representing an existing WMI object

If we start with Get-WmiObject

$w1 = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Process -Filter "Name = ‘notepad.exe’"
$w1 | get-member

If we try to emulate this with [WMI] we start to run into some issues.  The only path that I could get to work was

$w2 = [WMI]’rootcimv2:Win32_Process.Handle="4112"’
$w2 | get-member

I tried name, description and other candidates but none seemed to work.  Only thing I can think of is that to create that PowerShell is constraining the object creation.

Alternatively the object could be created like this

$y = [WMI]""
$y
$y.psbase.Path = ‘\PCRS2rootcimv2:Win32_Process.Handle="4112"’

Comparing the results of these three techniques we get

Compare-Object -ReferenceObject $w1 -DifferenceObject $w2
Compare-Object -ReferenceObject $w1 -DifferenceObject $y

Both of which indicate the objects are the same.

Looking at creating this with .NET

$z = New-Object -TypeName System.Management.ManagementObject -ArgumentList ‘\.rootcimv2:Win32_Process.Handle="4112"’
$z | Get-Member

Compare-Object -ReferenceObject $w1 -DifferenceObject $z

Again the same object is created and I could only get it to build when I use the handle.

The object creation works when I do

$t = Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_process -Filter ‘name="notepad.exe"’

As we need to know the path before we can use [WMI] it may be easier to use get-WmiObject instead.  I’d be interested in hearing other peoples take on [WMI] and how they are using it

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