Windows Scripting: What and How to do this? Batch Files or Something else?

If you want to target all versions of Windows, your best choice is writing a MS-DOS Batch file (.bat). Here's a good tutorial that I've used in the past.

If you are targeting modern versions of Windows (Windows XP SP2/2003/Vista/7) you should definitely take a look at Windows PowerShell, which is the new standard automation engine for the Windows platform.
PowerShell is a separate download for Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Vista, while it is included in Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7.

About Windows PowerShell

PowerShell is built on top of the .NET Framework and consists of a runtime environment, a scripting language and an interactive console.

Here are some of its key features that I find most valuable:

All processing is done using CLR objects, instead of text as in traditional shells
It is possible to interact directly with the classes in the .NET Framework
It is possible to run commands written in any .NET language and distributed as DLLs (called Cmdlets)
Great collection of built-in commands to accomplish most administrative tasks
The scripting language's syntax is C-style (curly braces...)
The runtime can be hosted inside any managed process as an ad-hoc automation engine

This isn't of course a complete list of all the features in PowerShell. If you are interested, I recommend you to look into it. Here is a good place to start.

+1 for PowerShell, although a link to a good tutorial would be nice.

musicfreak 2009-10-06 21:09:08

Thank you for your reply. I am guessing what can be done on bat files can be done on the PowerShell? Or can one do more?

Abs 2009-10-06 21:11:23

PowerShell can do a lot more than most shells, especially the MS-DOS emulator ;-) I updated my answer with some more details about PowerShell.

Enrico Campidoglio 2009-10-06 21:46:44

A nice compromise is VBScript, which is already present on Windows 2000 and later. It's more robust than batch scripting, but more available than Powershell.

Jason R. Coombs 2009-10-07 17:00:56

@Jason: You're absolutely right. I forgot about the Windows Script Host (WSH), which supports scripting in VBScript and JScript and allows to interact with COM/ActiveX objects. In that regard it is the predecessor of PowerShell.

Enrico Campidoglio 2009-10-07 19:56:31

ansaurus

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Windows Scripting: What and How to do this? Batch Files or Something else?

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