Insider Power Techniques for Microsoft® Windows® XP

Scripting and Automation

Applications such as Microsoft Internet Explorer and Microsoft Word come with (expose, in the jargon) a set of objects that define various aspects of the program. For example, Internet Explorer has an Application object that represents the program as a whole. Similarly, Word has a Document object that represents a Word document. By using the properties and methods that come with these objects, it’s possible to programmatically query and manipulate the applications. With Internet Explorer, for example, you can use the Application object’s Navigate method to send the browser to a specified Web page. With Word, you can read a Document object’s Saved property to see whether the document has unsaved changes.

This is powerful ...