Programmatic Administration Reference

Each system on your computer comes with a graphical user interface (GUI) to manage and configure your settings such as IIS Manager, the Computer Management snap-in, the Control Panel, Windows Explorer, and so on. However, if administrators manage systems frequently, or access large amounts of data on multiple servers, then using each GUI takes a lot of time. It is faster to use command-line scripts that can manage single or multiple systems programmatically. For example, if you have twenty IIS Web servers to which you want to add a script mapping, it would take a lot of mouse clicks and key strokes to do so through IIS Manager. However, if you wrote a command-line script that took as input a file containing the names of your Web servers and the name of the property you want to change, then you could make all the changes from one server with a single command.

To help you administer your server programmatically, this reference section describes the objects, methods, and properties of the Windows Management Interfaces (WMI) and the Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI), which can be used from any language that supports automation, and the IIS Admin Base Objects (ABO) which can only be used from Visual C++:

• IIS WMI Provider Reference: Describes the classes, methods, and properties of the IIS WMI provider.
• Windows WMI Reference: Provides a link to the Windows WMI documentation that describes the base classes, methods, and properties available in WMI.
• IIS ADSI Provider Reference: Describes the classes, methods, and properties of the IIS ADSI provider.
• Windows ADSI Reference: Provides a link to the Windows ADSI documentation that describes the base methods, and properties available in ADSI.
• IIS Admin Base Object Reference: Describes the structures, methods, and properties of the base IIS administrative interface which can be used from compiled C++ applications.