There is a special type of WMI class called "association class". This type of class binds two normal, related classes together. A typical example is association class for NIC-related classes. For each NIC in a system, there are two WMI classes for it:
Win32_NetworkAdapter &
Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration. The former mainly includes NIC hardware info, such as speed, MAC, media connection status, etc; the later mainly includes configuration info on a NIC, such as IP, DHCP, DNS, etc. More than often, you need to obtain info from both classes, and that's where association class comes to help.
Still using NIC as our example, windows defines an association class called
Win32_NetworkAdapterSetting, through which you can access info from both above-mentioned classes. An association class include two members, one called
element, the other called
setting. Not surprisingly,
element links to a Win32_NetworkAdapter object (because it is the element) and
setting links to a Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration object (because it is the setting stuff). Below is how you use it:
$ac = Get-WmiObject -Class win32_NetworkAdapterSetting #gets all NIC info
$connectedAdapters = $ac | where {([wmi]$_.element).netConnectionStatus -eq 2}
$connectedAdapters | foreach {([wmi]$_.setting)|select caption, dhcpEnabled,IPaddress,dnsServerSearchOrder }