4 ms·

This is great for me. As part of my day job I am often stuck writing batch scripts (yes, in 2014) for clients that refuse to run powershell. Writing a simple ba

This is great for me. As part of my day job I am often stuck writing batch scripts (yes, in 2014) for clients that refuse to run powershell. Writing a simple batch script is usually not a problem, but it can be very encumbering as the complexity increases. Thank you for sharing.

616c 12y ago
I want to agree, but my major gripe using the different incantantions of Powershell (and I have tried, I am Winboxen admin often in my job and tried it before any other co-worker on Vista, obviously the story has improved since) and the startup time and performance was abysmal. In terms of performance for very basic scripts (silent software installs, 5-10 lines, registry patching, etc.), I see the performance chart as: Batch > VBScript > Powershell in terms of speed. I wish I had tried Jscript, because the ironic Javascript is taking over the world could have meant retro hipster superiority (and scary you could integrate JScript and VBScript into the same script by embedding them in XML type directives and using the WSF system). Now that was scarier than any of this. As an aside, outside of speed, how do you sign scripts for clients? I love that Powershell encouraged it, but every person I have met has not bought into Powershell, and most certainly invokes "disable the cert check" completely command for all executed Powershell scripts.
- bkeroack 12y ago
  The speed difference between PS and cmd.exe is not nearly large enough to justify the incredible hoops you have to jump through to get anything reasonable done in batch. Yes it takes slightly longer to start up, but it has things like native arrays, hashmaps, foreach loops, etc built in to the language! Versus a spaghetti mess of gotos in batch.
nailer 12y ago
Do you charge them additional fees? If not you're screwing yourself over.
- nailer 12y ago
  Not sure why the downmods, web developers typically charge extra to support legacy systems requiring additional work, fir example, IE8
bithush 12y ago
Is VBScript/JScript not an option? It should be on every machine you come into contact with.
- ygra 12y ago
  The WSH can be disabled via group policies and often is.

616c 12y ago

I want to agree, but my major gripe using the different incantantions of Powershell (and I have tried, I am Winboxen admin often in my job and tried it before any other co-worker on Vista, obviously the story has improved since) and the startup time and performance was abysmal. In terms of performance for very basic scripts (silent software installs, 5-10 lines, registry patching, etc.), I see the performance chart as: Batch > VBScript > Powershell in terms of speed. I wish I had tried Jscript, because the ironic Javascript is taking over the world could have meant retro hipster superiority (and scary you could integrate JScript and VBScript into the same script by embedding them in XML type directives and using the WSF system). Now that was scarier than any of this. As an aside, outside of speed, how do you sign scripts for clients? I love that Powershell encouraged it, but every person I have met has not bought into Powershell, and most certainly invokes "disable the cert check" completely command for all executed Powershell scripts.

bkeroack 12y ago
The speed difference between PS and cmd.exe is not nearly large enough to justify the incredible hoops you have to jump through to get anything reasonable done in batch. Yes it takes slightly longer to start up, but it has things like native arrays, hashmaps, foreach loops, etc built in to the language! Versus a spaghetti mess of gotos in batch.

nailer 12y ago

Do you charge them additional fees? If not you're screwing yourself over.

nailer 12y ago
Not sure why the downmods, web developers typically charge extra to support legacy systems requiring additional work, fir example, IE8

bithush 12y ago

Is VBScript/JScript not an option? It should be on every machine you come into contact with.

ygra 12y ago
The WSH can be disabled via group policies and often is.