AW Monitor Informer (an experimental application done with WPF*, using WMI Display Classes**).  Written by Jose Pascoa

It has never been easy to retrieve comprehensive information about monitors. With Vista and Windows 7 the situation became even worse, when you look into the Device Manager of Control Panel most times all you got about a monitor is the cryptic "Generic PnP Monitor".

Oddly enough, most recent monitors provide lots of information, all we require are ways to retrieve it! This software retrieves most of that information  (yes, there is a bit more, but this is an experimental free software, so I stopped here for now!).

To use this software you must have Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 2008+ and .Net Framework 4.0 or later. Yes, I know many users are still happy with their XP machines (I love this one too), but XP does not have the required support for the Monitor Display WMI API (although most of the information could be retried indirectly as well). It is also necessary .Net Framework 4.0. Oh well, probably this is a lot of trouble and if you don't want to install .Net Framework 4.0 you have all my sympathy, truly. Anyway, I am going off-topic, so let me come back to the theme.

Not every monitor provides all information. Very old monitors, let me say older than 2004, may not provide it. Some recent monitors provide even more, but I am not collecting it. The software is only collecting information in six categories, Monitor ID, Basic Display Parameters, Video Connector Type, Analog Video Input Parameters, Digital Video Input Parameters and Color Characteristics. If a given monitor does not provide information in a given category the tree for that category will not expand.

All the Help is provided in big rectangular tooltips (see image below), I am not providing any Help file because it would not add anything to what the tooltips already tell.  Enjoy!

* WPF is just .Net on steroids. It is very tricky to retrieve information from this new WMI Display Classes using .Net. I think it is impossible to do it with .Net framework less than 4 (at least I could not figure out the way). The problem appears when the data type of a class member is another class. Of course, I could have done it with another technology like COM (or even a Powershell script), but decided to play with this WPF toy.

** According to Microsoft: WMI Monitor Display classes contain data supplied by the WDM Provider that provide data about display monitors. The classes are defined in Wmicore.mof and are located in the root\wmi namespace.
Windows Server 2003, Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Windows NT 4.0: These classes are not available

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