Section 1.4. A Brief Word on Windows Scripting

1.4. A Brief Word on Windows Scripting

Much has been said over the years about how unfriendly Windows Server is to experienced system administrators who want to automate tasks with scripts. I'm pleased to say that Microsoft has made some great strides in this area over the past three or four years so that now there are very few tasks that you cannot automate with a script.

Microsoft has developed three primary scripting interfaces over the years: WSH, WMI, and ADSI. Note that I said that these are interfaces, not languages. In generic terms, a scripting interface is just a framework for how a script calls functions or methods to perform tasks. WSH is the scripting engine that acts as the interpreter for the scripting languages that are native to Windows (i.e., VBScript and Jscript). It has an interface for doing basic scripting such as printing out to a console or displaying a dialog box, processing command-line arguments, and other basic system administration tasks such as reading and writing files and manipulating the Registry. WMI is the high-octane system management interface. With it you can query and often configure many of the components within Windows. WMI is to computers what ADSI is to Active Directory. ADSI is the primary scripting interface for querying and manipulating objects in Active Directory. You can also use it to manage local users and groups on a computer as well as the IIS Metabase.

For a more thorough introduction to each of these interfaces, check out Appendix A, Appendix B, and Appendix C.