Winbatch replacement

[scotts]

Hello, I have been using WinBatch since 2005 and have hundreds of compiled scripts and apps varying from simple to complex. When the news came down that Winbatch was closing down I was tasked with finding a replacement and begin re-writes. I now see that WinBatch is continuing on with new stewardship but my management still wants a replacement because the change was a startling reality.

Without sounding too treasonable to the scripting package I have used all these years... Any suggestions as to a suitable replacement besides the full blown MS Visual Studio Suite? The retirement of Winbatch brought up several items on the wish list from management for our small team of System Analysts/Scripters and I am afraid I cant get the Pandora's Box closed again.

Sincere advise welcome
Thanks,
Scott

[td]

Based on the response since the first of July, it would appear that there are not many members of the WinBatch community who share your view of "reality".

There have been so many programming/scripting languages created in the last few years that it has become an industry inside joke.   And you can find advocates for all of them.  They all have there strengths and weaknesses, and similarities and differences.  Good luck.

[JTaylor]

Probably shouldn't respond since I don't have any good suggestions if you are looking for the best option out there since you already have it.   I think that if your management wants a scripting language whose life is guaranteed to never end then you will need to stop scripting in your shop.   Visual Studio stuff, based on comments over the years as well as my own experience, takes a lot more time and effort to develop solutions.

Curious, what is on your/their wishlist?

Jim

[scotts]

The wish list I spoke of included IOS and Android compatibility and we have needed a source safe for quite a while. It will be a difficult pill to swallow if we do end up converting from WinBatch to Visual Studio. I agree converting to VS will be a challenge and it is more involved but the complete package they offer is hard not to take a good hard look at. Either way, I certainly didn't post this here to insult anyone because I have been a loyal user for years. Thank you

[JTaylor]

I don't think anyone was insulted, at least I wasn't, but guessing WinBatch probably won't be releasing and IOS or Android version anytime soon  :)

Jim

[td]

The wish list I spoke of included IOS and Android compatibility and we have needed a source safe for quite a while. It will be a difficult pill to swallow if we do end up converting from WinBatch to Visual Studio. I agree converting to VS will be a challenge and it is more involved but the complete package they offer is hard not to take a good hard look at. Either way, I certainly didn't post this here to insult anyone because I have been a loyal user for years. Thank you

If by "source safe" you mean source code management, I have had a SCM integrated into my WinBatch Scripting environment via WinBatch Studio for many years.  Also,  many if not most developers have abandon proprietary SCMs and use some flavor of GitHub or the like.

The last couple of iterations of MSFT's Visual Studio have become massive beasts but they are certainly feature rich with support for Python, PHP, and the dotNet languages just to name a few.  They also have full support for cloud and mobile OS development.  The full blown Visual Studio IDE is not that popular in the development community because of that size.  It can take an incredible amount of time just to load the full blown IDE.  This has become such a concern for MSFT that they have a new highly simplified and free code editor called Visual Studio Code.   It has plugins for various languages and other features that are also mostly free.  The plugins include things like syntax coloring, debugging and building.   If fact, some thought has been given to building a WinBatch plugin down the road.

Best guess is that if WinBatch gets ported to any non Windows system, it would  be ARM based Linux systems.   Mostly because while bash and Phython are great, WinBatch would be handy on the Pi.  Also MSFT is opening up most of the Windows kernel Linux support in the next iteration of Windows 10 which may make the task a little easier initially.

[stanl]

My .02  -  Best guess is that WB will integrate more into the CLR and possibly as a plugin for VS. But I one doesn't mind reading a bit further a specific example of how good WB is:

At work we have to access a remote Oracle database. Because of limitations we cannot open an ADODB.Connection, or Recordset - instead having to send a connection string and sql statement via

Code Select Expand


Oracle.ManagedDataAccess.Client.OracleDataAdapter($sql,$Conn)


Which I can do in Powershell with 3 lines of code (the output being a .csv file locally), or wrapping the PS CLR with WB can further process the results.  I have a colleague who uses VS to perform the same task, and I downloaded VS 2017 Community Edition as support. Taking everything the download files are around ~19 gig.  His code is over 800 lines and I could get the same result in WB with 10% of that.

P.S.  and I did open a thread about the Oracle ManagedDataAccess client and Tony helped solve the problem.  And I was hoping to come to a substantive conclusion, but enough has been said over the years about WB support and the community.