VBScript History & Information

VBScript is an acronym which means Visual Basic Scripting Edition. As the name suggests, it is a scripting language which has been developed by Microsoft. It is one of them most active scripting language available today along with JavaScript. If you go through the syntax of VBScript, you will observer many similarities between VBScript syntax and Microsoft’s Visual Basic Syntax.

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Programming Visual Basic Student, Ready?

Today, you are not required to install VBScript in your system because every release of Microsoft Windows, today, comes with VBScript installed by default. Microsoft started including VBScript in their operating systems since the introduction of Microsoft Windows 98. All our readers should remember that almost all scripting languages are called as light weight programming languages; same is the case with VBScript which can be regarded as a light weight version of Microsoft’s Visual Basic. You must also remember that a VBScript is and must be executed within a particular host environment. Generally, the VBScript hosting environment is already embedded in all current versions of Microsoft Windows. After some basic discussion of VBScript, let’s briefly review the history of VBScript.

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Computer Programming Concepts and Visual Basic

VBScript originated as a part of Microsoft Windows Script Technologies; which were released in 1996 and was meant for web developers only. Within couple of years, VBScript along with Jscript got evolved from version 1 to version 2.0. After some time, the latter version was called as version 5.0. VBScript was very much welcomed by various system administrators all around the world. Microsoft incorporated many features in the Version 5.0 of VBScript like inclusion of regular expressions, with statements, global functions, classes and much more. Currently, VBScript is managed and maintained by a special team of Microsoft; also called as the Microsoft’s Sustaining Engineering Team. This team is currently responsible for fixing all the bugs and for taking care of various security features. Now, as you have gone through some basic info about VBScript, we can move towards the creation of a sample VBScript code. Carefully follow the below steps:

  • First of all, before starting learning VBScript, make sure that you have some basic knowledge of HTML and how VBScript work. A VBScript is actually inserted in an HTML document and the browser that you use interprets the VBScript, unlike JavaScript which is already interpreted. After then, VBScript can be executed at any event.
  • Open notepad (in case of Microsoft Windows) or any other text editor.
  • Type in the following line of codes

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
<script type=”text/vbscript”>
Document.Write(“Hello world”)
</script>
</body>
</html>

The above piece of code will output Hello World on the browser. The VBScript starts with <script> and ends with </script>, similar to JavaScript. Document.Write is a function of VBScript that is used to write output which could be text and which may contain HTML formatting tags as well. For further learning of VBScript, please follow our coming sections that will guide you about various recommended online learning resources that you should use in order to learn VBScript in an efficient manner.

VBScript History & Information page