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Windows XP Annoyances for Geeks, 2nd Edition
book

Windows XP Annoyances for Geeks, 2nd Edition

by David A. Karp
November 2004
Intermediate to advanced
672 pages
19h 43m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Windows XP Annoyances for Geeks, 2nd Edition

Object References

There are some operations that can be performed with the Windows Script Host regardless of the language being used. These operations, such as accessing the filesystem, are made possible by extending the language with objects. For the time being, we can consider an object to be simply a context that is referred to when carrying out certain commands.

Admittedly, this can make carrying out some tasks rather difficult and convoluted, but it is necessary given the modular architecture of WSH. For example, many scripts will require a line similar to the following (using VBScript syntax in this case):

Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

which creates and initializes the WshShell object. WshShell is not a visible object like a file or other component of Windows, but rather a required reference used to accomplish many tasks with WSH, such as running programs, creating Windows shortcuts, and retrieving system information.

If you're unfamiliar with object references, your best bet is to simply type them as shown and worry about how they actually work when you're more comfortable with the language. The subsequent topics include many solutions that take advantage of objects, such as WScript.Shell, which has many uses, and Scripting.FileSystemObject, used for accessing files, folders, and drives.

Running Applications from Scripts

This code is used to run a program, which can be a DOS program, a Windows application, an Internet or mailto URL, or anything else ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596008767Errata Page