Tell Me Everything About Everything!

When novices first write WMI scripts, they nearly all begin by asking for every property about all instances of a class that are present on a particular system. (This is also referred to as the infamous "select * query".) As you have no doubt found out, this approach can often return an overwhelming amount of data, particularly when you are querying a class such as installed software, or processes and threads. Rarely would you need to have so much data. Typically, when you query for installed software, you’re looking for information about a particular software package.

There are, however, several occasions when I want to use the "tell me everything about all instances of a particular class" query:

  • During development ...

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