Converting to/from WMI Date Time

You will find many posts for how to convert a wmi date-time string to a human-friendly date time here’s one example from Don Jones.

First, here’s an example of the wmi date-time string:

Get-WmiObject -class Win32_OperatingSystem  | select __Server, LastBootUpTime

The value for LastBootUpTime will look something like this: 20120718141700.473048-300. This output is very handy for alpha-sort, by the way…
And Here’s Don’s code:

Get-WmiObject -class Win32_OperatingSystem | Select-Object __SERVER,@{label='LastRestart';expression={$_.ConvertToDateTime($_.LastBootUpTime)}}

Notice how Don elegantly converts the string on the fly with the label and expression arguments.

Now here’s an example of using a COM object to convert the current date time to a wmi date-time string.

$wmidate = new-object -com Wbemscripting.swbemdatetime
$date = get-date -format g
$wmidate.SetVarDate($date,$true)
$wmidate.value

Not nearly as elegant, but it gets the job done. When you create objects in ConfigMgr that require a date-time field, you will usually enter a wmi date-time string.

Happy Scripting!

Greg