six demon bag

Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

2016-02-27

VBSdoc - A VBScript API Documentation Generator

API documentation is nice, and being able to generate it from the code is even nicer. However, unlike Perl, Python, Java, or several other languages, VBScript doesn't have a feature or tool that supports this. Which kinda sucks.

I tried VBDOX, but didn't find usability or results too convincing. I also tried doxygen by adapting Basti Grembowietz' Visual Basic doxygen filter. However, doxygen does a lot of things I don't actually need, and I didn't manage to make it do some of the things I do need. Thus I ended up writing my own VBScript documentation generator.

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Posted 16:31 [permalink]

2015-01-17

Dim var() Considered Harmful

VBScript arrays can be created with fixed or dynamic size. Fixed size arrays are rather straightforward. Define Dim var(4) and you have an array variable var with 5 elements (indexes 0 through 4). Unfortunately dynamic arrays aren't quite as simple.

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Posted 18:26 [permalink]

2015-01-12

Translate VBA to PowerShell

Microsoft Office applications can be controlled from PowerShell in the same way they can be controlled from VBScript. Most of what was said in the previous article about translating VBA to VBScript applies to PowerShell as well, but there are some additional things to take care of due to the syntactical differences between PowerShell and the VB dialects.

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Posted 16:30 [permalink]

2014-06-07

Translate VBA to VBScript

Since I'm seeing lots of questions like "how can I do FOO in Excel/Word/... with VBScript" I thought I'd post some guidelines on how to approach this kind of task.

In general, VBA and VBScript are quite similar, so most of the time you're better off recording a VBA macro and translate that to VBScript than writing the whole thing in VBScript from the get go. There are some notable differences between the two languages, though, which you need to observe when translating VBA to VBScript.

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Posted 15:26 [permalink]

2014-06-04

Domain Password Change in Remote Desktop Sessions

At work we're connecting to customer systems through a jump station. This creates the problem that for domain password changes on the customer systems I can't open the Windows Security dialog/screen via either Ctrl+Alt+Del (shows the one on the local computer) or Ctrl+Alt+End (shows the one on the jump station).

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Posted 23:14 [permalink]

2013-10-30

Interactive VBScript Shell

Python's interactive mode is very convenient, because you can try simple stuff without having to write it to a script first. Since I have to do a lot of VBScript lately, I wanted to have something like that for VBScript, too.

I found this blog post that has almost exactly what I wanted, except for line continuation. Which is what I added (for my own convenience). You can download the modified script here.

Update: Added an Import() procedure for loading/executing additional code from other VBScript files.

Update: vbsh can now be customized with an optional init script %USERPROFILE%\init.vbs.

Update: Added a function to look up keywords in the VBScript documentation (requires that script56.chm is installed in the current working directory, the Windows help directory, or one of the directories in the %PATH%). Note that you'll need the English language version of script56.chm, since other language versions use different internal paths.

Posted 18:03 [permalink]

2013-08-27

Import other script files in VBScript

The VBScript language doesn't provide a feature for including other code files, so you can't easily build and import code libraries. However, the missing feature can be emulated using the ExecuteGlobal statement in a custom Import procedure.

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Posted 14:00 [permalink]

2013-04-03

Attach to Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer exposes a COM object that can be controlled programmatically e.g. from a VBScript. The usual way is to create a new Internet Explorer instance and work with that:

 Set ie = CreateObject("InternetExplorer.Application")

However, sometimes you may want to use an already running instance instead of creating a new one.

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Posted 20:59 [permalink]

2012-10-29

A Wrapper Class for Active Directory Queries

Tired of writing the same boilerplate code for querying objects from Active Directory over and over again? So am I. Thus I wrote ADQuery, a class that wraps the initialization of the required objects, sets some default values and also provides properties to allow for adjusting the usual parameters as the situation requires. See API documentation for details.

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Posted 19:49 [permalink]

2011-03-13

A Logger Class for VBScript

I got tired of having to re-implement logging routines for my VBScripts on a regular basis, so I wrote a logger class that serves as an abstraction layer for logging to interactive console/desktop, files or eventlog. Now I just instantiate a new logger, define the logging facilities (default is console/desktop for interactive, eventlog for non-interactive execution), and can log away with the same set of methods, regardless of log target. See API documentation for details.

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Posted 22:10 [permalink]

2011-02-16

Function for Reading INI Files

I wanted to be able to use INI files as configuration files for my VBScripts, so I wrote ParseIni() to parse the contents of an INI file into a dictionary of dictionaries. Comments are allowed and must begin with a semicolon. As of yet, any semicolon is treated as the beginning of a comment, so neither section titles nor key/value pairs can contain semicolons. I'll probably add a more sophisticated comment handling at some point, but right now this works well enough for me.

As usual the function can be used by either copy/pasting the code or by importing the file.

Posted 20:43 [permalink]

2011-01-13

Function for Inspecting (not only) Dictionary-based Data Structures

Dictionary-based data structures are quite handy in various situations. However, when the structures grow, they tend to become messy pretty fast. To deal with this issue I wrote a function DumpData() to inspect a given variable and return a string representation of its data. It can be used either by copy/pasting the code or by importing the script.

DumpData() was inspired by Perl's Data::Dumper module, although my little function is far less sophisticated. Just in case you were wondering.

Posted 14:15 [permalink]

2011-01-02

A Wrapper Class for VBScript Arrays

Although VBScript does support arrays, their handling leaves a lot to be desired. To deal with the shortcomings of the built-in arrays (or rather, to avoid having to deal with them) I wrote CArray, a wrapper class that provides operations like inserting, appending and removing elements, getting slices (sub-arrays), sorting, etc.

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Posted 03:23 [permalink]

2010-06-14

Active Directory Documentation

When you inherit an existing (usually home-grown) Active Directory, it can be a real pain to figure out how the thing was actually configured by the previous admin(s). In a situation like that it's kinda nice to have a tool at hand that'll do the dirty work for you.

Of course there's pay-ware like ADscribe, but personally I find $99 kinda expensive for something you're going to use every other decade (or so). Microsoft's own Active Directory Topology Diagrammer is freeware (well, sort of, since it requires Visio), but it has to be installed, and the results weren't that convincing when I tried to run it from outside the target domain.

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Posted 21:37 [permalink]