Somewhere in your company
there is a file
ending in dot vbs.
Probably more than one.
A logon script
that maps the shared drives.
A scheduled task
that zips last night's exports.
A build step
nobody has opened since
the person who wrote it left.
An Excel macro
that borrows VBScript's
regular expressions
to clean up a column.
They all run today,
through cscript or wscript,
the way they have
for twenty years.
That is ending,
on a published schedule.
In 2023
Microsoft announced
that VBScript is deprecated.
In 2024
it laid out three phases.
First,
from Windows 11 version 24H2,
VBScript becomes an optional feature,
installed and on by default.
Nothing breaks.
That is the phase
you are in now.
Second,
around 2027,
it stays available
but is no longer on by default.
New machines,
fresh images,
rebuilt servers
arrive without it.
Third,
at a date not yet given,
it is removed,
DLLs and all.
The danger is phase two.
It will show up first
where machines are new.
On the laptop
for the next starter,
whose drives do not map
on the first morning.
On the rebuilt build agent
where a step that has always passed
fails,
with an error
that names a file
nobody remembers.
On the finance PC
where the macro stops
at the first line
that touches the regex object.
Nothing will warn you
the day before.
So go looking now,
while it still works,
because working code
is easy to read.
Search shares,
group policy,
scheduled tasks,
repositories
and build definitions
for dot vbs,
cscript
and wscript.
Search your Office files
for the VBScript
regular expressions reference.
Then build one test machine
with the optional feature
turned off,
and run your real start of day
on it.
Logon,
the nightly jobs,
the macros finance uses
at month end.
Whatever fails there
is your list.
Microsoft points you
to PowerShell or JavaScript.
Pick one
and move the scripts one at a time,
starting with the ones
nobody understands.
A dependency
nobody chose
is still a dependency.
It is just the last one
you find.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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