Accessing hardware configuration from a Metro App

When we create Metro Apps for Windows 8, we could imagine some scenario where we would like include some device resources information like CPU or memory usage.
The bad news is that we cannot get this data from the device. And yes, Windows 8 works as expected. We need to realize that a Metro App run on Windows 8 in a very isolated environment. The application don’t need to know one what environment run, how many memory is used by the system and so on. The lifetime of the Metro App is controlled by the operating system and all the resources that an application can need are offered by the system.
Remember? A Metro App should do only one think, but it should do this think best. In this moment I cannot imagine extreme Metro Apps, like some other desktop application that can do almost anything. If we realize that we work at a Metro App that do to many thinks, that a good idea is to split it in 3,4 or why not 10 applications. When we have a user that accesses our application, we don’t want to have a user that is lost in 97 functionalities. In the moment when he opens the Metro App we want to let him to do only one thinks, without any problems. I have nightmares with desktop applications that were so complicated that I could not remember how I can submit my time report or what I can send a message to admin.
Even if we cannot obtain real time information, we can query the operating system about what kind of processor have, what other devices are connected to our device or what printers are installed.
Let’s see what information can we access and how. The PerformanceCounter don’t exist anymore in Metro Apps. It can be found only in desktop applications. We still have functions named GetNativeSystemInfo that can be used only for applications that run on x64. But you will not be able to extract a lot of information from there. Don’t expect to be able to retrieve the processor load or memory level.
What I tried to use to get information about the device was DeviceInformation.FindAllAsync(…). This is the official way that can be used to get device information. The first parameters that need to be specified are the interface GUID. Based on this GUID specific information will be loaded. Some GUID values that can be used are:

• {0ECEF634-6EF0-472A-8085-5AD023ECBCCD} – Printer interface
• {6AC27878-A6FA-4155-BA85-F98F491D4F33} – External devices connected (portable devices)
• {E5323777-F976-4F5B-9B55-B94699C46E44} – Webcam interface

In general the second parameter will remain NULL, but it can be useful when we want to filter the result based on object property.

var printers = await DeviceInformation.FindAllAsync(
      “{0ECEF634-6EF0-472A-8085-5AD023ECBCCD}”,
      null);

In this C# example we got the list of printers installed on the device. The Java Script equivalent for this command is:

Windows.Devices.Enumeration.DeviceInformation.findAllAsync(
‘"System.Devices.InterfaceClassGuid:="{97FADB10-4E33-40AE-359C-8BEF029DBDD0}""’,
null)
.done(function(printers) {
                // iterate through items.
                }

For Java Script is mandatory to add the also the given text before the GUID (don’t’ forget about the “”). When now results are found the count of the returned collection is 0 and not NULL.
Now, let see a small hack with this function. Normally we can access only printers, webcam and external devices. But this method was port from Windows 7, where we can access other information also. If we know the correct GUID and are not limited by Windows 8 we can access other data also. For example if we set the GUID to “{0ECEF634-6EF0-472A-8085-5AD023ECBCCD}” we will get the list of processor on that computer. For example for my PC I got a list with the following content:

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU       2630QM @ 2.00GHz

I thinks that also other information can be accessed based on the GUID. Did you found other GUID that are working?