Why Use MI?

The Windows Management Infrastructure (MI) features represent the latest version of the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) technologies, which are based on the CIM standard from DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force). MI is fully compatible with previous versions of WMI and provides a host of features and benefits that make designing and developing providers and clients easier than ever.

Reduced development time

MI reduces development time by providing new native provider APIs, native client APIs, and .NET APIs that no longer require complex COM coding to interact with WMI. In addition, there are in-box and SDK tools that ease the development process.

Tighter integration with PowerShell

MI introduces a new way of creating PowerShell cmdlets (called "CIM-based cmdlets") that use XML to map PowerShell commands and parameters to any new or existing MI classes, methods, and properties. The new APIs also include support for rich PowerShell semantics such as PromptUser and Warning.

Standards-based

The MI APIs have been updated to align with the DMTF standards. The default machine-to-machine communication now goes over WinRM (the Microsoft implementation of the WS-Man standard), and the MI APIs also expose standard error and event classes (CIM_Error and CIM_Indication). Combined with the new PowerShellextensions, this alignment with standards enables IHVs to provide IT pros the ability to manage CIM-compliant devices from Windows using PowerShell over WS-Man.