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Microsoft Says VBScript Will Be Ripped From Windows In a Future Release - Slashd...

 11 months ago
source link: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/23/10/10/2314203/microsoft-says-vbscript-will-be-ripped-from-windows-in-a-future-release
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Microsoft Says VBScript Will Be Ripped From Windows In a Future Release

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Thomas Claburn reports via The Register: Microsoft has stopped developing VBScript after a 27-year relationship and plans to remove the scripting language entirely in a future Windows release. The Windows biz said on Monday that VBScript, short for Visual Basic Scripting Edition, has been deprecated in an update to its list of "Deprecated features for Windows client." "VBScript is being deprecated," Microsoft said. "In future releases of Windows, VBScript will be available as a feature on demand before its removal from the operating system." VBScript debuted in 1996 and its most recent release, version 5.8, dates back to 2010. It is a scripting language, and was for a while widely used among system administrators to automate tasks until it was eclipsed by PowerShell, which debuted in 2006. "Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition brings active scripting to a wide variety of environments, including Web client scripting in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Web server scripting in Microsoft Internet Information Service," Redmond explains in its help documentation. Unfortunately, Microsoft never managed to get other browser makers to support VBScript, so outside of Microsoft-exclusive environments, web developers tended to favor JavaScript for client-side tasks.

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I thought the whole premise behind Windows was backwards compatibility. They screwed that up already with failing to run 16 bit windows applications, which they absolutely could have supported in any of several ways. If it's not going to run your antique software that I can run in an emulator or virtual machine on top of any OS that's a real failure that makes modern Windows on the bare metal less valuable.

  • Re:

    16 bit software will run on Windows today, but only on 32-bit versions of Windows. My non-expert understanding is this is because of a silicon limitation in how thunking is handled, but I don't know enough to know if that's true or not.

    • Re:

      They stopped making 32bit versions of Windows. There's no 32bit Windows 11. And it's not true; people have gotten the NTVDM to run by modifying the leaked source files. You can find instructions online for compiling it yourself. So MS could have done that themselves and supported 16bit on 64bit, but they chose not to.

  • I'm still running a game from 2000 on Windows 11, and that's without any "compatibility mode."

    Only thing that doesn't work without a hack is the help system, since Windows 11 doesn't support 2000-era ".hlp" files "out of the box."

    • Re:

      Civ 2 CTP Multi Gold and SMACX don't work right even on Win7 x64 without patches. Civ 2 doesn't even work without patches in XP Mode on Win7 x64 either, pretty hilarious. Does work in everything else (virtualbox, vmware, etc etc.) but Virtual PC couldn't do it. Much eyeroll.

      I would like better support for accelerated graphics in QEMU/KVM though. I'd donate to that. I am using libvirt and I am very happy with the compatibility and reliability, I've found it to be better than vmware in those ways.

      • Re:

        CIV1 works fine on dosbox, so all is good.

  • Re:

    OTDVM works well as a solution for running 16-bit windows software. It's not quite as good as the real 16-bit WOW though.

  • Re:

    Dude. 16 bit windows apps are 31 years old. Get the updated binary. The windows 95 version will work. Those are 28 years old.

    • Re:

      There is no guarantee at all that something written for Win95 will work on a modern Windows. And guess what, some Win95 things indeed can't work on a modern Windows, except under emulation.

      Not to mention that VBScript itself is a thing from the Win95 era.

      • Re:

        Thats not what I was replying to. I was replying to a guy complaining about Windows 16 (Windows 3.1, basically a wrapper over DOS) apps not working. Half the people working in IT where not even born when those where still a thing.

    • Re:

      Wrong! Bill Gates insisted on backwards compatibility, even to the extent of keeping it possible to navigate around the desktop with only the tab and back-tab keys, and around tabs of the various control panels with the arrow keys. I know, because back when Win 98SE was the Latest and Greatest, I was doing phone tech support, and a caller's mouse stopped responding in the middle of a complex procedure to reconfigure the network. With a little bit of experimenting on my end, I was able to talk the caller

      • Re:

        The way how a tab key works has nothing to do with backward compatibility.

      • Re:

        There's an obscure Windows setting called Mouse Keys that allows you to control the mouse pointer by using the numeric keypad's arrow keys to move the pointer and the middle "5" key to click on something. I have used it as a mouse back-up since Windows XP; it came in handy a few times when the mouse failed and I didn't have a spare one on hand. It's also on my Windows 10 Pro system, I've just configured it now and it's active after a reboot.

    • Re:

      Actually, it was, for a while. Compatibility Mode was well supported and was pushed hard by Bill Gates while until he left and others slowly killed it. After its dominance was assured, forward lookers gained traction.

  • Re:

    Our company has literally hundreds of.vbs scripts (written in VBScript, of course) which are used to automate various things. Thanks Microsoft, I guess. What is the excuse this time? Muh security again?


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