I wasn't quite sure whether this would be better on StackOverflow or not, feel free to move it if you think it's more appropriate there.
Anyway on to the question...
The Situation
We currently have a mish-mash of VBScript, DOS batch files and a handful of PowerShell scripts performing various tasks within the business.
The tasks range from figuring out who is logged on to a particular machine by IP to fairly complex text processing and database queries (SQL Server 2005/2008)
VbScript is really not a great language although it does have pretty good debugging support, PowerShell is much better but the (free) debugging support is pretty rudimentary and the less said about batch files the better
The Question
Without wanting to start a flame war (objective comments only please!) I'd like to standardise on a single scripting language, the requirements are :-
- Must play well with Windows
- Good debugging support (something as good as Visual Studio or Eclipse would be perfect, I'd settle for something as good as the current VBScript debugger)
- Good exception management
- Good memory management (Garbage Collection)
- Good support for connecting to databases (SQL Server)
- COM support would be an advantage
- Preferably a light (or no) install so we can put it on servers without breaking anything
- Performance isn't key, these are mostly overnight jobs
- Easy(ish) to learn for a company mainly used to C#/Java/VBScript/VBA
I'd be very interested in your thoughts/recomendations