This is one of the coolest things ever
Of course, if you don’t love programming, you won’t think so.
Ever wonder how you could script your windows box to do whatever you want? Sure, you could install Perl, but what if you want to do something windows specific, like get a list of devices which aren’t working right in Device Manager?
Enter the Scriptomatic.
The tool is simple: you select a WMI class, and Scriptomatic will generate a script which shows you all of the output of that class. Sounds silly. How about an example: if we select the Win32_Processor class, we get back all kinds of information about our processor. Here’s some of the output from scriptomatic on my machine:
LoadPercentage: 100
Manufacturer: GenuineIntel
MaxClockSpeed: 1202
Name: Intel(R) Celeron(TM) CPU 1200MHz
Neat! What if we had a laptop, and we wanted to make sure that we had enough time on the battery to run a particularly lengthy script? No problem, just call up Win32_Battery in scriptomatic, see how that script is checking the TimeOnBattery property and then put that in your own code. It’s fun, for instance, I found out that SharpReader has thrown 21,718 exceptions since I started it up when I booted my machine. When was that? Win32_Session tells me I started my current windows session on December 8th at 13:22:32.
I’ve wondered why Windows didn’t have its own native scripting language for a while now. Turns out it does, I’m just a moron for never finding out about it.
[John’s on vacation; this message was previously recorded blah blah blah nobody reads this crap at the bottom of the page anyway so why do I even bother.]