DotVBS | Windows Systems Management

For nearly two decades, the safety net of any Windows Administrator was the assumption that "it's just built-in." No matter how locked down a server was, you could always count on Notepad, Calculator, and the Windows Scripting Host (CScript/WScript) being there. With the release of Windows Server 2025 last year, that assumption is officially dead. Now that many organizations are moving past the "wait and see" phase and starting their upgrades, we are seeing the real-world impact of Microsoft's list of removed and deprecated features . If you are still relying on legacy scripts (and if you read this site, you probably are), here is what is breaking in production environments right now. 1. VBScript is now a "Feature on Demand" (FOD) This is the big one. In Windows Server 2025, VBScript has been moved to a Feature on Demand status. "VBScript is available as an FOD... before its removal from the operating system in a later release...

It has been a long time since the golden era of SMS 2003 and SQL Server 2005. If you are reading this on DotVBS , you likely landed here for one of two reasons. First, you might be maintaining a legacy environment that simply refuses to die. You have a server rack somewhere running an OS that hasn’t seen a patch in a decade, and a critical login script just failed. You needed that specific WMI query I wrote in 2008 to pull a hardware ID or fix a cache location. Second, you might be a systems engineer in transition. You grew up on On Error Resume Next and CreateObject("WScript.Shell") , but the world has moved on to cloud instances, CI/CD pipelines, and PowerShell. This post is for both of you. It’s ironic that a site dedicated to "Windows Systems Management" via VBScript is seeing a resurgence in traffic not because the technology is new, but because it is now "rare earth" knowledge. We are entering the long-tail end of VBScript's lifecycle. M...