VBScript - History

History

VBScript began as part of the Microsoft Windows Script Technologies, launched in 1996. This technology (which also included JScript) was initially targeted at web developers. During a period of just over two years, VBScript advanced from version 1.0 to 2.0, and over that time it gained support from Windows system administrators seeking an automation tool more powerful than the batch language first developed in the early 1980s.

On March 6, 1988 Alan Cooper showed Bill Gates his shell prototype that allowed widgets to be added dynamically. March 20, 1991, Microsoft adopted "Quick Basic" to Ruby Shell. This allowed users to create Windows apps quickly and easily with a GUI. Finally, on August 1, 1996, Internet Explorer is made with features that include VBScript.

In version 5.0, the functionality of VBScript was increased with new features such as: regular expressions; classes; the With statement; the Eval, Execute, and ExecuteGlobal functions to evaluate and execute script commands built during the execution of another script; a function-pointer system via GetRef, and Distributed COM (DCOM) support.

In version 5.5, SubMatches were added to the regular expression class in VBScript, to finally allow script authors to capture the text within the expression's groups. That capability had already been available in JScript.

With the advent of the .NET framework, the scripting team took the decision to implement future support for VBScript within ASP.NET for web development, and therefore no new versions of the VBScript engine would be developed and it moved over to being supported by Microsoft's Sustaining Engineering Team, who are responsible for bug fixes and security enhancements. For Windows system administrators, Microsoft suggests that they migrate to Windows PowerShell. However, the scripting engine will continue to be shipped with future releases of Microsoft Windows and IIS.

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