News from Rob van der Woude's Scripting Pages

• A bug in DateDiff.bat has been fixed: the subroutine calculating the Julian date was too eager to strip leading zeroes without checking if there actually was one.
It took a bit of debugging to find the error, so the updated batch file has a number of new features, including verbose output and debugging.
I also added the option to specify an alternative date format, instead of the computer's local date format.

• WMIGen.exe has been updated:

search functionality has been improved, and has been added to the code view and query results windows as well
the program now uses a secure connection for the update and license checks

• A minor update for BirdName.exe:

improved detection of the required .NET Framework version in Debug Mode
the program now uses a secure connection for the update check

• As of yesterday, this site supports secure connections (https://www.robvanderwoude.com/) besides the "classic" unsecure connections (http://www.robvanderwoude.com/).
So far, most pages seem to work fine with a secure connection, but I haven't finished testing, yet, if all images and scripts and stylesheets and iframes still work.

• And as of tonight (20:30 GMT) all HTTP requests are redirected to HTTPS.

• BirdName.exe has been updated:

you van now copy the scientific name or a translation to the clipboard with a single click
you can select to (HTML) escape text before copying it to the clipboard
in debug mode, you are prompted to view the list of supported languages

• MultipleChoiceBox.exe is a new batch tool to present a list of choices as grouped checkboxes.
It was derived from RadioButtonBox.exe, but using checkboxes allows multiple selections, hence its name.

• ConsoleState had a major update:

the new command line switches /MAX and /MIN and /NORMAL can be used to maximize or minimize the console window or restore it to its normal state
the new experimental command line switch /NOACT tells the program to NOt ACTivate the window when restoring it (often ignored)
return codes when invoked without arguments have been modified: errors => -1, normal window => 0, minimized window => 1 and hidden window => 2

• Henrik Jensen sent me a message stating that using FIND to convert strings to upper case still works in Windows 10 (the text on my web page still said it was tested in XP only).
What's more: of the upcase methods shown here, it is the only one that also works for non-ASCII characters!

Thanks Henrik

• RadioButtonBox.exe "final" has been released.
The latest feature is the optional command line switch /DE to remove duplicates from the list.

• A bug in WMIGen.exe's generated batch code has been fixed.

• Check out the (re)new(ed) WMI Queries for Hardware page if you need to collect hardware inventories.

• Besides specifying the number of rows, you can now specify the number of columns too for RadioButtonBox.exe (but not both).

• I added automatic window sizing to RadioButtonBox.exe.

• RadioButtonBox.exe is a new batch tool to present a list of choices as grouped radio buttons.
It is equivalent to DropDownBox.exe, but with radio buttons instead of a dropdown list.
It is still in beta, I will be running more tests to check if the size and location of radio buttons work out for different scenarios.

• A minor update for isDST.exe: it has been recompiled to work with .NET Framework 2.0 to allow using the program on older systems.
There is no change in the program's functionality.

• A bug in InputBox.exe: the /I switch did not make all regular expressions case insensitive as intended; this bug has been fixed.

• Another update of DropDownBox.exe:

with the optional command line switch /S the list items will be sorted.
with the optional command line switch /K the first item of the list (header) will be skipped

So the sample code presented two days ago can be simplified:

WMIC.EXE Printer WHERE "Network=TRUE" Get Caption | DROPDOWNBOX.EXE "Select a network printer" "Network Printer" /K /S

• DropDownBox.exe has been updated: it now accepts redirected input for its list.
This is demonstrated in the following code to select a network printer (enter as a single command line):

WMIC.EXE Printer WHERE "Network=TRUE" Get Caption | MORE.COM /E +1 | SORT | DROPDOWNBOX.EXE "Select a network printer" "Network Printer"

Note: MORE.COM /E +1 is required to remove the first line (the "Caption" header) from WMIC's output; or you can use FINDSTR.EXE /B /L /V "Caption" as an alternative.

• PrinterSelectBox.exe has been updated:

the optional (mutually exclusive) command line switches /N and /O limit the listed printers to network or local printers only
window height and width can be set using the new optional /H and /W command line switches
command line validation has been improved

• InputBox.exe has been updated:

besides its optional /R switch to test the input with a regular expression after it has been submitted, it now also supports on-the-fly regex testing with the new optional /F switch
with the new optional command line switch /I regular expressions will be case insensitive
with the new optional command line switch /U (requires /M) the returned result will be unmasked for masked input (i.e. literals from the mask will be removed from the result)

• SystemTrayMessage.exe has been updated: when using the optional /W switch, the program will wait for the timeout to elapse or for the user to click the message, whichever occurs first.

News Page