I am looking for a library to create reasonably usable 2D GUIs using standard control types (drop lists, text boxes, buttons, etc. housed in a window or dialog box) in the VBScript programming environment, on the desktop, using the Windows Scripting Host (WScript.exe
).
I already looked at HTA documents, but the UI is extremely antiquated, clunky, and slow, because it's hosted in an instance of IE; it's also limited in functionality by the web platform, or more specifically, by IE's poor implementation of the web platform.
To give an idea of the type of thing I'd like to use, the .NET System.Windows.Forms
namespace is a proper superset of the kinds of things I need, and I don't need anything like animations, 3D, etc. that would be available in a more advanced framework like WPF.
So, if we are to scale our desktop UI sophistication expectations back to about the year 2003 or so, is there a COM library that can be instantiated to design custom Windows UIs in VBScript / Windows Scripting Host? I already know that the native Win32 API is not available, so CreateWindowEx
and family from user32.dll
can't be directly called. That is why I am looking for a piece of software.