Introduction

Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition, commonly known as VBScript, is a relative of the Visual Basic family, which includes the Microsoft Visual Basic Development System (the retail version of Visual Basic in its Enterprise, Professional, and Learning Editions) and Visual Basic for Applications (the language component of Visual Basic, which is included in the individual applications within Microsoft Office and Microsoft Project, as well as in a host of third-party applications).

VBScript is, for the most part, a subset of the Visual Basic for Applications programming language. It was developed so that the millions of Visual Basic developers could leverage their knowledge of VB/VBA in Internet scripting. One of the strengths of VBScript is that it uses the same familiar and easy syntax that has made VBA so popular as a programming language, making it very easy to learn for those who have some Visual Basic background. In addition, VBScript is fairly easy to learn for those without any programming experience.

Ironically, VBScript started as a client-side scripting language to create interactive web pages, but it had a major liability: it was and is not supported by Netscape Navigator. Instead, the two major web browsers on the market, Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer, both supported a common scripting language, ECMAScript, that became the de facto standard and is now the de jure standard for client-side scripting. (Netscape's implementation of ECMAScript is named JavaScript, while Microsoft's implementation is named JScript.) Despite its failure in this area, however, VBScript rapidly became the major scripting language in three other areas:

• Active Server Pages (ASP) applications
• Outlook forms
• Windows Script Host (WSH) scripts