Management Elements
Before you can manage, you need something to manage. Figure 1 illustrates my managed system. It couldn’t be much simpler—just a single PC running Windows XP hosting the .NET environment.
Figure 1 The managed system.
Perhaps the first surprise with Figure 1 is the fact that the managed system can manage itself. Isn’t this a bit like a doctor treating herself? Clearly, a production environment would involve the management of multiple networked machines rather than just the one shown in Figure 1. But the principles remain the same.
What kind of data can you extract (using C# code) from the managed system in Figure 1? Quite a lot, actually. Let’s look at some code that makes use of the C# System.Environment class.