ActiveX Scripting Hosts

ActiveX scripting architecture supports powerful scripting using languages such as VBScript, JScript, Perl, and others. Microsoft currently provides three hosts for running these scripting languages across the Windows platform:

In addition to having a smaller footprint than the other two scripting hosts, the Windows Scripting Host does not rely on an HTML SCRIPT tag or LANGUAGE attribute to identify a scripting engine. Instead Windows Scripting Host uses the extension of the script file to determine which scripting engine to use. As a result, the script writer does not need to obtain a scripting engine ProgID. The scripting host itself maintains a mapping of script extensions to ProgIDs and uses the Windows association model to launch the appropriate engine for a given script.

For more information about how Windows Scripting Host works, see:

http://www.microsoft.com/management/wsh.htm.