VbScript

A stripped down version of the VbClassic, an older dialect of VisualBasic, that is targeted at using driving/manipulating ComComponents and existing ObjectModels.

It is intended to be a step below VisualBasicForApplications (VBA), however a lot of cool features were added to VbScript that should be incorporated into VBA and VisualBasic. Some have, if you count stuff like the file and dictionary (hash table) objects.

For more details on the differences see these articles:

http://msdn.microsoft.coytuiyum/scripting/vbscript/doc/vsgrpNonFeatures.htm http://msdn.microsoft.com/scripting/vbscript/doc/vsgrpVBSFeatures.htm [dead links?!]

On VBScript itself see

 http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/script56/html/vtorivbscript.asp

VbScript can be used in place of JavaScript for scripts running in web browsers (assuming the web browser is Microsoft's). It can also be used in ActiveServerPages. It can be used as a stand alone as a replacement for BAT files. It can be used to write com objects. And coolest of all, it is easy to integrate into your own pet project.

The above 'graph describes what's cool about ActiveXscripting, the pluggable interface that lets any pet project plug into any language on the fly, including JavaScript, VbScript, PerlScript, PythonScript, etc.

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Dictionaries can be used by Vbscript in an ActiveServerPage to do the work equivalent of collections in VbClassic. See http://www.microsoft.com/mind/0698/dictionary.asp

Also in recent years regular expressions have been introduced to VbScript, for a introductory article with examples see http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/asp/vbscript-regular-expressions/.

• Version 5.5 onwards of VbScript has submatch. An example usage is shown in http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnclinic/html/scripting121399.asp

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It can be used as a stand alone as a replacement for BAT files.

Could you expand on this a little bit? Is there really a way to call an MS-DOS command and pipe the result back into an ASP page? I would really, really, really love to be able to do that. -- WayneMack

Long-distance, yes you can pipe a command line into an ASP page. What AnonymousDonor meant was that among the various pet ActiveXscripting hosts is the WindowsScriptingHost. This lets you plug in any of those scripting languages, and fronts the objects needed to do primitive console IO directly.