Welcome to the Scripting Guys' First Blog
Posted by Greg Stemp. Welcome to the Scripting Guys’ first blog. You might very well be saying to yourself, “Why a blog? Shouldn’t you guys be doing something else with your time … like, say, releasing that Active Directory browser?” Well, probably. But the blog seemed like an interesting diversion, and for at least two reasons. First, blogs are hip, they’re cool, they’re in, and we Scripting Guys desperately want to be seen as being hip, cool, and in ourselves. Why else would we have started to wear our baseball hats backwards, to listen hip-hop music, and to ride skateboards to work? Why else would I say, “Yo, dawg” at every opportunity? (Well, OK, I do that less in an attempt to be cool than an attempt to embarrass my 14-year-old son whenever possible. But the point is, if there’s a bandwagon, you can expect the Scripting Guys to jump on it.)
Perhaps more important, though, we also saw the blog both as intriguing venue for communicating with the scripting community and as an outlet for sharing information that just didn’t make sense as a Webcast or article. For example, from time-to-time people write to us and ask things like, “How come all the scripts in the Script Center are written in VBScript?” or “Can you guys recommend a good book on database scripting?” Because the same questions pop up over and over, we thought it would be useful to have our answers written down and available to anyone who might be interested. Now, that’s fine, but it still doesn’t answer the question: why a blog, why not just an FAQ? Well, to tell you the truth, while we often have an answer to a question, we might not always have the answer to the question. Can we recommend a book on database scripting? Probably, but there are just as likely to be 100 other books on database scripting that we never even heard of. With the Script Center, and with a typical FAQ, there’s no mechanism for the scripting world to augment, correct, or otherwise respond to things that we say. With a blog, though, we can recommend a book on database scripting, and then the rest of the scripting community can chime in, telling us why our recommendation is a poor one, telling us about other books we overlooked, or maybe even saying they agree with us. (Ok, that last one is unlikely but, hey, we can dream, right?)
As for what we intend to accomplish with this blog, well, to tell you the truth, we have no set agenda; we’re just along for the ride ourselves. We decided to start off by addressing some of those frequently asked questions, sometimes to provide an answer, other times just to kick off a dialog. From time-to-time we’ll likely talk about what it means to write a script or to manage systems using scripts. We might ponder the future of scripting, we will definitely include plenty of tips and tricks (coming soon: how you can determine which scripts are running on a computer), and sometimes we’ll probably just jabber away about nothing. But that’s what blogs are for, right?
At any rate, we encourage you guys to contribute to this effort, either by commenting directly on the postings, or by emailing us at scripter@microsoft.com and letting us know what topics you’d like to see us address here. That doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll address them, but, hey, you can dream, too, right? (Ok, it's not much of a dream, but, still ....)