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# What You Can Do with WSH Scripts

You can use scripts in many ways to customize your Windows system. Here are some of the tasks you can automate using scripts:

- Back up or restore files on your system. (This capability is particularly handy if you need to save only a few files from your machine to a network server.)

- Shut down or restart Windows with a mouse click. You can also use a script to add special shutdown or startup tasks, such as backing up certain files after closing applications or logging a user's name after booting the system. (The ability to log information via scripts is especially useful in Windows 95 and Windows 98; in Windows NT and Windows 2000, many logging features are built in.)

- Integrate applications and their data. For example, a script can launch an Office application, load and process a document, print it, and close the application. Using scripts in this way, you can "associate" a document with any application you choose.

- Manage system administration tasks such as adding, updating, and removing user accounts in Windows NT and Windows 2000. You can use a WSH script to automate all these tasks by using the Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI) provided with Windows NT and Windows 2000.

- Directly access the Windows shell through suitable objects (to create shortcuts or map network devices such as drives or printers).

- Read environment variables or retrieve information about Windows.

- Launch programs and control Automation objects.

- Display dialog boxes that inform the user about the program status or retrieve user input.

- Access the Windows shell and Windows application programming interface (API) to control windows and other applications.

## A Few Remarks About VBScript and JScript

WSH, which ships with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 (and comes in a downloadable version for Windows 95 and Windows NT 4), comes with two programming languages, VBScript and JScript. VBScript uses the same syntax as Visual Basic; it is actually a subset of Visual Basic. JScript is Microsoft's implementation of ECMAScript, the vendor-independent programming language based on JavaScript.

These two programming languages are all you need to enter the world of script programming. However, Microsoft designed an open interface for WSH so that third-party vendors can integrate their own language engines to support other languages such as Perl, Tool Control Language (Tcl), and Rexx.