EDIT: Oops, meant to post this on stackoverflow :), but since this is for power users, maybe you could answer what scripting languages you use for windows?
I'm trying wrap my head around all of the different scripting technologies for Windows (what are they, and which are the most common) and ultimately to figure out what type of scripting to add to my application.
I've read that with .NET 4 it's easy to make your program scriptable via dynamic languages like IronRuby and IronPython (or even VB or C# which might be more confusing for a user?) My understanding is that pre .NET 4 the way to add scripting support for your application was to make it a COM/OLE object so people could use vbscript, winbatch, shell scripts, or another scripting language (or really any language that supported COM) to control your application? What are the common scripting languages use? I've heard a lot of people talk about VB for Applications. Is that a dynamic language or a compiled language and to allow my application to be scriptable via VB for Applications would I have to support COM/OLE? I think I'm leaning towards supporting IronRuby and IronPython since it seems simple to implement support for them, but can those languages also be used to script Windows or other applications in general (and thus scripts for your application could have more features than what you laid out)? How would you go about designing your application to be scriptable?
I know that seems like a thousands questions, but really what I'm looking for is just an explanation of the scripting technologies for windows (what are the main differences, how frequently are they used) and which ones are the most common/standard to support when making your application scriptable?
Thanks in advance everyone!!