VBScript deprecation: Timelines and next steps

I find PowerShell, the language, verbose and not very ergonomic. This ship has sailed, but I wish Microsoft had done something to make Windows automation a little closer to other platforms, so that it could benefit from the good software that exists on other platforms.<p>It seems that VBA will continue to exist as the programming front end for MS Office, which is unfortunate. They had announced Python support for Excel a while back and I wish it was better promoted as a viable VBA replacement.

So far I have avoided Powershell in anything distributed to end users, because execution of unsigned scripts is disabled by default in Windows. It has been easier to use VBScript or BAT files to automate basic tasks, since those scripts can be run unsigned... I suppose it is too much to hope for that Microsoft would now reconsider enabling Powershell script execution by default.

I&#x27;m glad that Microsoft takes a really long time to deprecate these things.<p>It&#x27;s &quot;This gets extra awkward in 3 years, and dissappears some time after that&quot;, not &quot;This disappears in 3 months&quot;.

&gt; Notably, these browsers have never implemented support for VBScript.<p>This reads mildly accusatory and got a chuckle out of me.<p>I&#x27;m surprised it took them this long!

Just ran into a Y2038 bug in some classic ASP+VBScript code in production the other day. Someone long ago wrote `Date() + 5000` to set an expiry date far in the future (5000 days). As it turns out, 5000 days from now puts us past 1970-01-01 + 2**31 seconds (2038-01-19ish) and that causes VBScript to raise an error and abort the ASP page request with a 500 error.<p>I raised the issue that we have about 14 years left of ASP+VBScript literally being able to execute properly and calculate dates (sans any large date additions remaining). Guess it&#x27;ll be sooner than that based on this post but 14 years is definitely the upper bound if your VBScript code even touches dates.

I wonder if I’m the one who will get stuck porting the large number of 20+ year-old asp pages we have at my day job to something else?<p>(Which have been working fine all this time, BTW.)<p>These pages are actually jscript (a variant of javascript), but we probably need to understand this to mean that’s going away as well.

I know lots of software products which use VBScript to realize application scripting

Probably one of the most maddening things I have ever worked with, and that is saying something. Though a huge part of the blame for that goes to COM and registration, interop stuff, which is more Windows than VBScript and also probably never truly going away.