How to: Enumerate All Instances of a Class (C#)

This topic provides step-by-step instructions for enumerating the instances of a specified CIM class using the Windows Management Infrastructure (MI) .NET API. In addition to the steps, a full source code example is provided at the end of the topic.

Step-by-step Instructions

1. Add a reference to the Microsoft.Management.Infrastructure reference assembly. (This assembly ships as part of the Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows 8.)

2. Add a using statement for the Microsoft.Management.Infrastructure namespace.

   using Microsoft.Management.Infrastructure;
   

3. Instantiate a CimSession object. The following snippet uses the standard "localhost" value for the CimSession.Create method.

   CimSession cimSession = CimSession.Create("localhost");
   

4. Call the CimSession.EnumerateInstances method passing the desired CIM namespace and class whose instances you want to enumerate. The following snippet enumerates the instances of the Win32_Process class. (You'll need to add a using statement for the System.Collections.Generic namespace so that the compiler can locate the IEnumerable type information.)

   IEnumerable<CimInstance> enumeratedInstances = 
     cimSession.EnumerateInstances(@"root\cimv2", "Win32_Process");
   

5. Loop through the returned CimInstance objects.

   foreach (CimInstance cimInstance in enumeratedInstances)
   { /* access desired CimInstance members */ }
   

Example

The following code sample enumerates all instances of the Win32_Process class (which represents active processes) on the local machine, and prints the name of each process.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using Microsoft.Management.Infrastructure;

public partial class MI
{
    public static void EnumerateInstances()
    {
        try
        {
            CimSession cimSession = CimSession.Create("localhost");
            IEnumerable<CimInstance> enumeratedInstances = 
                cimSession.EnumerateInstances(@"root\cimv2", "Win32_Process");
            foreach (CimInstance cimInstance in enumeratedInstances)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("{0}", cimInstance.CimInstanceProperties["Name"].Value.ToString());
            }
        }
        catch (CimException ex) 
        { 
            // Handle the exception as appropriate.
            // This example prints the message.
            Console.WriteLine(ex.Message); 
        }
    }
}