In WMI, information is published using schemas. Schemas group management classes and instances that are used within a particular management environment and which present a consistent and unified view of all types of logical and physical objects. Management objects are represented using object-oriented constructs such as classes. The classes include properties that describe data and methods that describe behavior. Third-party developers can create their own custom schemas to describe vendor-specific environments. Because schemas are meant to be infinitely extensible, developers can always add new classes to represent new managed objects in an existing environment.
When surfacing information through WMI, good schema is critical to enable tools to manage your application. Structuring information in a schema is an essential feature for a distributed management system; it allows operations to be defined that can be confidently processed across a range of systems, all of which support the schema. The existence of the schema provides the ability to discover what can be done, as well as facilitating the actual performance of the enabled operations. Schemas provide the ability to represent, control, and configure the structure of the environment.
WMI also supports associations, which are instances of association classes and are used to represent relationships between WMI objects. Association relationships are visible to management applications. WMI defines association classes to support system classes. Third-party developers can also define association classes for their management environment.
Because the System.Management.Instrumentation namespace allows developers to customize the mapping between managed classes and WMI classes, it is possible to have the best of both worlds. Application developers are free to define classes with the structure that is most natural to their applications. The managed classes can be mapped to WMI classes that conform to WMI schema standards. This allows developers to be productive when using the managed classes, but allows management tools to properly interpret the instrumentation data provided by the application.
See Also
Using WMI with the .NET Framework | Queries | Management Events | System.Management and System.Management.Instrumentation Namespaces