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richard
richard

Reputation: 12508

Another meaning for namespace?

I was just reading about the ManagementScope class on MSDN and it said something that confused me.

The example connects to a namespace on a remote computer.

Huh? What is a "namespace on a remote computer"? I thought a namespace was an artificial way to group functionality together. Wikipedia says a namespace is "an abstract container or environment created to hold a logical grouping of unique identifiers or symbols".

What is MSDN talking about?

Upvotes: 3

Views: 242

Answers (2)

PHeiberg
PHeiberg

Reputation: 29811

The documentation refers to Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) namespaces. Which groups WMI objects into a hierarchy just like namespaces in the BCL. In WMI security and access to objects are set on namespace level.

From the WMI Glossary - Namespace:

A categorization of classes and instances used to control their scope and visibility. Namespaces are not physical locations. They are more like logical databases containing specific classes and instances. Namespaces are represented by the __Namespace system class or a class derived from it.

Upvotes: 3

hemp
hemp

Reputation: 5663

Windows Management uses the Common Information Model (CIM) which uses classes organized into namespaces.

Per MSDN: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee198933.aspx

Namespaces are the partitioning mechanism employed by the CIM to control the scope and visibility of managed resource class definitions. Each namespace in the CIM contains a logical group of related classes representing a specific technology or area of management.

Namespaces are roughly equivalent to folders on a disk drive. Like folders, namespaces provide a place to store related information; a folder named Scripts is likely to contain scripts and a namespace named MicrosoftActiveDirectory is likely to contains WMI classes used to manage Active Directory. Both folders and namespaces help you to uniquely identify an item. You can have only one file on a computer named C:\Scripts\WMI_Script.vbs; likewise, you can have only one WMI class named root\cimv2:Win32_Process.

Most of the classes used by WMI reside in the root\cimv2 namespace.

Upvotes: 1

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