So I've been defeated by COM and WMI. To me, what's missing in the Delphi world are comprehensive tutorials and documentation like you can find with MSDN and Sun (for Java). What I ended up trying to do was look at existing code that uses WMI in Delphi, and attempt to reverse engineer it. I have a reasonable understanding of the objects and techniques used in the sample code, but when I got stuck, I had no idea what was causing the problem. Unfortunately, the time ran out for the competition before I could make anymore headway.
Earlier in the competition, I posted about my usual steps when learning something new, for the Darwin Race of Languages, I got stuck on step 2, developing the proof of concept, by reverse engineering existing examples.
If anyone is interested in looking at the code I was working on, the entire project is in a zip file here. Note that I'm not sure if all the imports will be correct on anyone elses pc, as the paths were local to my pc. I can't really call the code "my code", since it was mostly a cut and paste from someone named ciuly. I also used as reference, this project from Planet Source Code, which interestingly enough had errors, but ran on my workstation. When I attempted to extract the code and place it in my project, I ran into the same EOleException that I had in ciuly's example. That leads me to believe that the issue lies somewhere in my project, but not in the sourcecode.
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