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

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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