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HotFixes! Get your Red HotFixes!
By: Jeffery Hicks

Keeping servers and desktops up to date and patched seems like an endless chore. Getting computers updated isn't necessarily that difficult. But what about finding what has already been installed? Using Windows PowerShell and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), you can easily acquire this information. What's more, you can work with objects that make reporting very simple by using cmdlets such as Out-File and ConvertTo-HTML.

In Microsoft-speak, any patch or update is referred to as a hotfix. These updates are tracked in WMI using the Win32_QuickFixEngineering class. Querying this class in PowerShell is as easy as:

PS C:\> get-wmiobject win32_quickfixengineering

The class has several properties, some of which may be populated depending on the computer, operating system (OS), or hotfix. The more you work with this clas s, you'll discover a few quirks that are OS dependent. For example, the InstalledOn property should display the date when a hotfix was installed. On Windows XP or Windows Server 2003, this property value is very recognizable as a date. However, in Windows Vista, the date format is less user-friendly--do you know what date this is: 01c8e2c0a6cfee4e? I certainly didn't.

To make your job a little easier...

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