• Visual Basic® Scripting Edition (VBScript)
• JScript®
• Windows Script Runtime (including the File System Object and Dictionary)
• Windows Script Host (WSH) 2.0
• Windows Script Components
• Windows Script Debugger
• Windows Script Control
• Remote Scripting

 Steps to get started:

1. Read the other sections under Getting Started
2. Download all the Microsoft documentation
3. Buy a good book (Teach Yourself WSH in 21 days is a good start)
4. Check out the FAQ
5. Join this community so that you can be notified of updates and receive the newsletter

VBScript and JScript are ActiveX scripting engines. This means that, like other ActiveX controls, they can be hosted by applications such as Active Server Pages and WSH. This is very similar in concept to Visual Basic for Applications which is incorporated into MS Office and is available to other software publishers to use in their applicatins. One of the differences is that Windows Script is free where as VBA must be licensed.

.NET will bring about many changes for Windows Script and VBA. JScript.net replaces the JScript ActiveX scripting engine. VBA and VBScript are replaced by VB.NET. Visual Studio for Applications (VSA) is the host that vendors will use to provide a dynamic runtime capablility to applications that run on the .NET platform. Because .NET is an add-on to W2K and Whistler it may be some time before VSA is common place. So you can probably see that VSA can be used to produce WSH.Net (my prediction anyway :-)

But for the next couple of years, WSH will be the primary script environment for administrators to get the job done. In the next couple of pages I willl cover "how to get the job done" using WSH.