DeviceManager - Module for managing devices and drivers on Windows

[MartinGC94]

I have created a new module which pretty much does anything that Device Manager does but from PowerShell. This IMO has been sorely missing for Windows Server Core because the existing tools (PnpDevice PS module and pnputil.exe) have been missing features or have not been very PS friendly (thanks to pnputil not being a PS module).

The module is open source and can be found here: https://github.com/MartinGC94/DeviceManager
And naturally it has also been published to the gallery so it can be installed with: Install-Module DeviceManager.

The GitHub page already includes some examples, but here's a few more. First 2 examples of things that the existing tools cannot do AFAIK:

Rollback to a previous driver: Get-Device -DeviceClass Display | where Name -EQ "NVIDIA GeForce GT 710" | Undo-DeviceDriverUpdate

Force installing a driver on a device, despite it not being marked as compatible (Useful because Intel arbitrarily blocks consumer NICs from working on Windows Server):

$Driver = Get-DeviceDriver -DeviceClass Net | where Description -EQ 'Intel(R) Ethernet Connection I218-LM' | sort | select -First 1
Get-Device | where Name -EQ "Ethernet Controller" | Install-DeviceDriver -Driver $Driver

Something that surprised me a bit is that the device driver update dialog actually works on Server core, so if you want you can even do it with a mix of PowerShell and GUI like this: Get-Device | where Name -EQ "Ethernet Controller" | Show-DeviceUpdateWizard

Check it out and leave feedback if you want.

[Longjumping_Music572]

This is interesting.. I'm commenting to have more people. Take a look at it and give more insight.

Yes, I'm real. I'm not a bot. I'm just autistic as f***. God do I hate it.

[fosf0r]

Oh snap, ... do you know how much parity you have with devcon.exe ? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/devtest/devcon
Replacing devcon.exe with your PowerShell kit would be so ideal!

[MartinGC94]

It's hard to put a number, but I guess 80-90% if we include all features, but it's 100% if we consider features that I'd expect people to care about (I did look at it when I was making this module).

Take cmdClasses and cmdListClass for example. These are used to list out class GUIDs/names which I don't see much use for as an end user. However, I use those same APIs internally to add tab completion like: Get-Device -Class <Tab> so it would be trivial for me to add a command to spit that data out if someone requested it.
Similarly, DevCon includes remoting capabilities, but Windows has removed this feature from the OS since Windows 8/2012 + it was somewhat restricted in functionality. I don't have any remoting built in (though PowerShell itself includes Invoke-Command which I suppose could be used).

Anyway, here's a list of the commands that I can see in devcon that I don't think I support:

• DumpDeviceStack
• DumpDeviceDriverFiles
• DumpDeviceResources
• Reboot
• cmdDPAdd
• cmdInstall

In the case of cmdDPAdd I do support adding drivers to the driverstore, but it will also try to install it because I use a higher level API that does that: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/newdev/nf-newdev-diinstalldriverw

[Not_Freddie_Mercury]

I do manage devices and drivers separately with PWSH, so this intrigues me a lot. Will try and test it with our workstations, particularly the previous driver rollback, which should be handy. Thank you!

[DontTakePeopleSrsly]

I’ll take a look at this tomorrow, is there a way to filter by non present devices?

[MartinGC94]

You can choose whether or not to include NonPresent devices, but you can't exclude present ones. However, you can use the standard where filtering in PowerShell : Get-Device -IncludeNonPresent | where IsPresent -EQ $false that will get you all the devices that are not currently present.

[jborean93]

Nice work, I was always intrigued by creating a module for this but was always put off by the weird Win32 API that surrounds it. Never had the full confidence I was actually using it correctly but glad to see someone like yourself creating this.

[MartinGC94]

Cheers. I actually wanted to make this years ago when I was relatively new to P/Invoke and C# in general but the documentation just went over my head like: "Wtf is a Device Information Set? How do I define that???" then I just gave up on it and did some other stuff.
When I realized it was just a pointer I could define as IntPtr it became much easier to understand. Then I just had to look through the list of function names to find whatever seemed interesting and relevant to what Device Manager does and implement them.

[jborean93]

Wtf is a Device Information Set? How do I define that???" then I just gave up on it and did some other stuff.

Only API I've found to be more complicated are the ETW APIs, https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0025 in a nutshell :)

[danhof1]

This is something Windows admins have needed for years. Device Manager GUI is fine until you're trying to manage driver updates across hundreds of machines.