Windows Scripting Host (WSH)

At last, the Windows Scripting Host has finally brought a decent scripting platform to Windows. WSH allows you to write scripts in VBscript or Jscript that can perform many tasks. No compilation, no mess, just a simple text file that works.

However VBscript and Jscript are very limited. They can't call windows APIs, they can't do anything too powerful. They can call COM objects, and Toolsack Baseline is a set of COM objects that bring you power to the WSH.

Here are some of the objects included in the library and what they can do for you.

TypedLists

VBScript and JScript are typeless, we include a number of typed lists - StringList, NumberList, DoubleList and ObjectList, so you know what you are collecting.

Email

Send SMTP email from your scripts. It's easy. The component is very powerful, it can send alternate bodies, HTML bodies with embedded pictures, different chararcter sets and more. See the documentation for the api.

Sockets

Use sockets for connections to custom backends or for standard functions such as whois lookups or web server requests. The api is not just a light wrapper around a raw socket, it is designed from scratch to do the work scripters want to do. You can even listen on sockets so you can write your own server. Who would have thought you could write a vbs web server?

Stopwatch

Time code down to the nearest micro-second. Great for debugging.

FileVersions

Look at version information of DLLs and EXEs.

COMInstaller

Installs self-registering COM DLLs. A COM replacement for regsvr32.

Sleeper

Pause for a few milliseconds or two.

HTTPFetcher

Makes it easy to download data from Web Servers. URLFetcher also works with ftp, https.

GMT

Get GMT and convert back to your time zone.

SpecialFolders

An object that makes it easy to find out the important directories on a computer - temp, system, windows, program files, desktop and more.

Sound

Get your script to beep or play a tune.