Choosing the Appropriate Scripting Language

Although any code that can be run on Windows or Windows PE can be called as an application installation or through an MDT task sequence step, Microsoft recommends using scripts in the form of .vbs or .wsf files.

The advantage of using .wsf files is built-in logging in addition to some other predefined functions already used by the ZTI and LTI processes. These functions are available in the ZTIUtility script distributed with MDT.

When referenced from a custom script, the ZTIUtility script initializes the MDT environment and setup classes. These classes are available:

· Logging. This class provides the logging functionality that all MDT scripts use. It also creates a single log file for each script run during deployment and a consolidated log file of all scripts. These log files are created in a format designed to be read by TRACE32; this tool is available in the System Center Configuration Manager 2007 Toolkit V2.

· Environment. This class configures environment variables gathered through WMI and MDT rule processing and allows them to be referenced directly from the script. This allows deployment properties to be read, giving access to all the configuration information used by the ZTI and LTI processes.

· Utility. This class provides general utilities that are used throughout ZTI and LTI scripts. Microsoft recommends that any time custom code is developed this class should be examined to see if any code can simply be reused. Additional information about some of the functionality provided in this class is included later in this section.

· Database. This class performs functions like connecting to databases and reading information from databases. In general, accessing the database class directly is not recommended; instead, rule processing should be used to perform database lookups.

· Strings. This class performs common string processing routines like creating a delimited list of items, displaying a hex value, trimming white space from a string, right aligning a string, left aligning a string, forcing a value to string format, forcing a value to array format, generating a random globally unique identifier (GUID), and Base64 conversions.

· FileHandling. This class performs functions like normalizing paths and copying, moving, and deleting files and folders.

· clsRegEx. This class performs regular expression functions.

In MDT, a couple of changes have been implemented to the script architecture to make client Microsoft Visual Basic® Scripting Edition (VBScript) more robust and reliable. These changes include:

· Extensive changes to ZTIUtility.vbs (the main script library), including new APIs and better error handling

· A new look to the overall structure of the ZTI_xxx.wsf scripts

The overall structure of the MDT scripts has also changed. Most MDT scripts are now encapsulated within VBScript Class objects. The class is initialized and called with the RunNewInstance function.

Note Most existing MDT 2008 Update 1 scripts will work as-is in MDT, even with the extensive changes to ZTIUtility.vbs, as most MDT scripts will include ZTIUtility.vbs.