>The power comes from its ability to manipulate OLE Automation servers.

My findings in this area show that scripting rarely lives up to its potential. COM and Scripting in particular is an awesome force to reckon with in the areas of user assistance, but from how I've seen most applications implement scripting, this is never really the focus.

Lately, I've been working on user assitance in one of ARS's flagship products, and a really cool use for scripting. Lets say I recieve an XML transaction that has a problem, either a required field was missing, or a duplicate value was entered, ect. Since this is an extremely disconnected process, we used to just chuck the transaction in a "badtran" DBF file and give a small sentence explanation of the problem, so a tech could figure it out, modify the XML, and resubmit it manually.

I decided that instead of a sentence in a memo field, I would create an HTML document depending on what the error was, an include as much information as possible. That was nice, I added an IE window to my forms, and the common user could check out what was happening. Then I took it a step further. Say the error was a duplicate value was given for what should be a unique number. On the HTML page, I added a textbox and a button, the user would see the problem, be explained that a new number was required. They could fill in a new number and hit the button.

This would then run scripts that I built into the page to modify the XML to the new values, and then resubmit it to the processing components. I'm very interested in exploring how far I can take these technologies in the direction that I think they were originally intended.