Orchestrate an Efficient .NET Network Using the WMI Event Model

f there were an election for the most underrated .NET framework technology, I'd vote for WMI. ADO.NET and Web services seem to get all the marketing attention, and technical publications can't get enough Reflection. But WMI exposes an entire universe of system information, and here’s the best part: it’s not even a .NET technology.

What's WMI Again?
WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) is Microsoft's implementation of the Web-based Enterprise Management (WBEM) initiative, an industry-wide standard for programmatically querying and manipulating all kinds of system functionality. Using WMI through .NET, you can programmatically shut down a server, or examine its hardware, or iterate through its running processes.

But one of the best things about WMI is the event model. You can register to be notified of just about anything happening on your local machine, or even a remote one: changes to registry keys, disk activity, and—the focus of this article—processor utilization.

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