Wow. With the new dynamic and graphical dialogs there's
just nothing you can't do in WinBatch now.
I no longer have to open up my Delphi anymore. ;-)
WinBatch brings the power of professional
programming to hobbyists. I started up the corporate
tree of software development, then quickly decided
I wanted to have fun with programming instead. WinBatch
is FUN! (C++ is not)
I love this stuff.
Thanks for all your hard work,
Clint
(GUI Guy)
I have been in the IT industry for over 12 years,
and in 1997 had the opportunity to work with your
product for the first time.
Since then, every company I have joined or every
contract assignment in which I have engaged, Winbatch
has been a tool I have purchased and / or strongly
recommended. The same applies to my current job as
Network Services Manager at a corporation in Phoenix.
Winbatch is invaluable for performing minor to complex
tasks either in a login script environment or through
deployment scripts with desktop management software
/ distribution tools. Winbatch gives you the power
that only top notch C++ or VB developers can enjoy,
but takes away the complexity. A guy from our development
environment was amazed at some of the tasks I was
able to perform in Winbatch with as few as 20 lines
of code and a couple hours of work.
Anyway, just wanted to put in my two cents worth.
Oh, and the best part - $495.00 - this is cheap. I
would gladly pay 10 times that for the convenience
and time this product has saved me.
Thanks,
KH
Network Services Manager
I have been using WinBatch now for quite a while and I
mainly use it to have a fully integrated system run on a
Server-Client base that is nothing more than a Home Theater PC.
The whole stuff works with a remote and needs only 10 keys to
control everything like DVD-playback, File-playback (MP3 etc.)
Movie Database, Video recording and much more.
T.S.
I have been using WinBatch on and off since 1992.
I have a computer science degree, and have been working
on both mainframe and PCs. I have worked with at least
twenty different formal programming languages, and
at least as many productivity tools. Nothing has given
me more joy, and impressed more bosses than good old,
tried and true, WinBatch. I say tried and true because,
unlike VB, I have never had a problem with the language
itself. WinBatch is the only software I have purchased
that has been very thoroughly tested by the company,
prior to being released to the public.
Here's a brief list of what I have done with WinBatch:
1) Integrated five languages together in order to
deliver a project on time to a customer. The application
involved the mainframe, and was primarily written
in Mozart (a mainframe GUI tool). Mozart could not
handle environment variables, so WinBatch was used
to start up the application, passing critical information
about the users setup, which contained a rather extensive
amount of DOS variables created in the config.sys
file (DOS 6.x). WinBatch was also used to collect
information from FoxPro, and Excel. It then re-formatted
the info, placed it into a text file, and sent it
up to the mainframe, using the Irma LAN connection.
2) Parsed through 50 gigabits worth of Web Log Data
into a format that could then be feed into Web Trends
for reporting. The original developer wrote a UNIX
script that took approximately 300 hours. I initially
attempted to pseudo-code this in WinBatch. Surprisingly,
my pseudo-code ran the entire process in 7 hours (non
compiled), which thrilled the customer to the point
of satisfaction. That was good enough for them. Using
WinBatch's binary buffer commands, I created a memory
manager which cut down on excessive I/O. The problem
was the information had to be parsed a certain way,
then written out into individual states (up to 50).
Rather than write out each parsed line to the respective
output files, I created one large buffer and split
it into "n" number of states. The code then fills
up each specific logical buffer in memory, and only
performs a write to file when a buffer area maxes
out. This may sound difficult at first, but WinBatch
has some really powerful functions that make this
a piece of cake. Take a look at BinaryWriteEx(). (This
particular version of WinBatch only allowed a max
of 10 buffers, so I hand to be innovative. The latest
version allows 128). I also built Checkpoint/Restart
logic into the program. This was helpful to the user,
in case they needed to shut down the PC. The program
is able to sense that it has not completed it's prior
run, and asks the user if they want to continue where
they left off.
3) Developed a COBOL copy book converter. Converts
a COBOL record layout into a format suitable for Jasmine
II.
I could go on and on with many of the other productivity
features that come standard with WinBatch, like the
RoboScripter, PopMenu, FileMenu, each of which I use
extensively, but it's really more fun to discover
these on your own.
I always tell others that this is a must have tool
for any serious PC developer. What makes WinBatch
such a perfect fit for me is that it does not limit
my creativity in any way. It's not the answer for
every assignment. It's not suitable in situations
where an object oriented approach would outweigh a
structured one. However, It's sort of like that favorite
tool a mechanic has in his/her tool chest that has
come to the rescue time and time again. In the right
hands, this tool can do anything!
JZ
To whomever this concerns,
First of all I wanted to commend
you on an excellent product.
I have been in the industry for 12
years as a programmer, Network Administrator and etc.
I have seen a lot of utilities to help automate things
and I have written several.
Two weeks ago one of my peers was
working on a project in Winbatch. I have heard of
Winbatch before but I was very proficient in VB and
had no desire to learn a what I thought was a very
limited batch language. This peer started asking me
programming logic questions when he was writing this
Winbatch utility. I asked him to send me the code
and I would look it over. (I thought surely it is
similar to VB in some respects and I could give him
a pointer or two.) After reviewing his code and seeing
how easy it was to do things with the built in extenders,
I thought where have you been all of my career. I
then thought of all the time this little miracle would
have saved me in the past. Needless to say I spent
the next 5 days writing Winbatch scripts to automate
everything that is repetitive in my job. (Mostly backend
server maintenance stuff.)
When the Love Virus hit I wrote a
utility that cleaned it up: Reg settings, Trojan,
Infected VBS files and etc in one day. Then I wrote
a Winbatch program to continuously scan the Exchange
servers MTA message Queue directory cleaning out any
infected files based on a virus signature file. We
had this running on each Exchange server on our customers
Global network. (This was a fill in for a commercial
solution that we have installed now.) But none the
less the power of Winbatch played an important part
in helping us get our customers systems back online
in record time.
Thank you! Thank you!,
V. W.
I have to write and thank you for your absolutely
outstanding, world class, much appreciated technical
support. Although I have never found a situation I
can not resolve using WinBatch, I do occasionally
have some difficulty handling the tougher nuts. You
(and everyone else at WWW) provide REAL help and invaluable
insight into the deeper recesses of Win95 and NT.
Well, I just wanted to say Thank You! Your help
is appreciated more than I can express.
J. V.
Monroeville, PA
Thanks for the WinBatch poster. It is a very handy
quick reference for me. I can see that there is a
lot to know about this very useful tool. Wish I had
a second one for the office (hint, hint). Anyway...
I would like to take this opportunity to personally
thank you for the quick responses to the web-board
and to tell you a little story of how time saving
this product is.
First off, I am a computer consultant. About a year
ago, I was tasked with extracting "hot link" URL's
from 10 Excel spreadsheets (they appear hidden inside
a cell), each with approximately 8,000 entries. I
wrote an "automated extraction" app using WinBatch,
and let the program run overnight. I have compiled
a list to show how much time I figured I saved my
client from having to do this extraction manually.
I thought you'd find it interesting:
ESTIMATED TIMES:
Total extractions 8,000 X 10 spreadsheets = 80,000
Extraction manually at 15 secs/cell
Total manual extraction time 1,200,000 secs or 333
hours X $100/hr = $33,333
WITH WINBATCH:
Cost of Compiler $500
Program development/De-bug 20 Hrs X $100/hr = $2000
Even if I charged to "watch" the program run it would
have cost less than $3,333
TOTAL SAVINGS at least $30,000
I don't know if other Winbatch "fans" have saved
this kind of money, but as a consultant, I can't even
begin to tell you how elated my client was. Thanks
go out to you and the others that have made this product
a "must have" addition for their toolbox. KEEP UP
THE GREAT WORK!!!
Terry
I don't do this often. Just wanted to let you know
that I downloaded your program on Monday morning,
got a small script working by Monday afternoon, registered
and ordered the product over the phone from Eugene,
OR about 3:00 PM and received my official copy by
9:00 AM Tuesday morning. I have not used the product
much yet, but from what I see I'm hoping for good
things. It really helped for the small application
I automated yesterday. Your order and shipping department
was great!
Thanks,
R.B.
Eugene, OR
I am delighted to say that this Upgrade reached me
yesterday morning and installed beautifully. It greatly
impressed me that it did NOT over write my configuration
files, merely loading new versions with a NEW prefix
to the filename. That is highly intelligent program
design.
Thank you for your help and understanding.
CP
England
Hello! I just wanted to thank you for a great product
(WinBatch) and congratulate you with your excellent
technical support. The support pages are the best
I have found on the net so far, and I have yet to
get a problem I haven't found the answer to very quickly
by searching the site. My company is using Winbatch
to update our website with news and recordings of
our broadcasts, and it's working excellent.
Yours,
I. H. O.
Vadsoe, Norway
Conf: WinBatch Script Exchange
RE: Script not working as expected
You guys are great. I never expected such a quick
response. 10 minutes?!? The script works beautifully
now. It could use a little streamlining to account
for those machines that don't require the registry
hack, but that's about it.
Thanks for the help!
G.M.
I am a Swedish/Latin American journalist, living
in Stockholm and writing on IT and culture for Swedens
largest morning paper. I ran into your site by hazard
and I wanted only to congratulate you for the effort
and the good work.
A.V.
Stockholm, Sweden
WinBatch has made me a hero at my company. Our project
required us to manually download thousands of cameras
from Kodak's Photonet site. Manually, it would take
me 5 minutes to go through the Kodak site to download
one camera. With WinBatch, I can start a script when
I leave at 5:00 and download 200 cameras over night.
Thanks.
J.O.
Spanish Fork, Utah
Just felt like telling you that "you are simply the
best". No problems at present, but I really enjoy
reading your forum because it's fast, knowledgable
and entertaining.
Best wishes,
H. S.
Australia
Since I mostly post problem reports, I thought I'd
mention that I am thoroughly impressed with this product.
I've only just begun to use it and already my productivity
has increased significantly over what I was using.
Almost every day I find some little feature that
works just like it should. The bookmark facility is
stupendous. The only thing I would add there is some
form of permanent named bookmark (like in Word) so
I could mark section of code and go directly to them
by name and which wouldn't get erased by the erase
all bookmarks button.
The color coding is unbelievable. I've avoided several
typos that would have caused program failures that
I would have had to debug later. The only minor thing
I'd like is nested comments since Rexx supports that.
Search and replace and find are excellent.
W.C.
Compuserve
Gentlemen/Ladies,
I cannot praise y'all enough for this wonderful
product. I am a Software Engineer at Turner Broadcasting
Systems in Atlanta, Ga and was tasked to integrate
the installation of several different products and
applications (i.e. Oracle client, custom controls,
in-house PB & VB applications, etc...) into one comprehensive
installation utility.
After doing a little research into how things were
currently deployed (DOS batch programming), I recommended
the purchase WinBatch+Compiler to allow me to complete
my task (I "played/evaluated" the demo extensively).
This tool paid for itself within DAYS! My team has
delivered, in weeks, an installation utility that
would have taken months to do in a traditional programming
language, perhaps not even delivering the same result.
It took me a matter of days to ramp up on the WIL
language, and once there, I was blown away by the
level of power and flexibility it provided. Y'all
have really delivered the goods. This is one very
cool tool EVERY developer should have in his/her toolkit.
Kudos to everyone at Wilson WindowWare and please
keep up the excellent work!
G.M.
Atlanta, Georgia
Hi all!
I just recently heard about your WinBatch products
from another developer, so I thought I'd better check
them out, so I downloaded WinBatch evaluation and
a couple of add-ons for testing.
HOLY SMOKE! WinBatch is INCREDIBLE! Where have you
BEEN all my life?? --
C. R.
Just a simple plug to tell you how much I like your
product. The only thing I could think of to make it
better would be direct support for STDIN and STDOUT.
Thanks,
-- J.S. Kentucky
Started testing, things seem to be functioning, as
always your tech support is 'Top Drawer' and we appreciate
the support!
Vic
I am a long time user of Winbatch and have as of
today joined the ranks of Winbatch Compiler users.
I work as a administrator/tech support person for
a mid size printing company, Golden Eagle Press in
Reno, NV. I also run a consulting business Jacy Services
and/or The Byte Jockey. I know all to well the issues
of providing tech support over the phone. This background
BS is just so you know the source.
For the past couple of years I've reached Deana
a lot when I call for support. I just want to say
that she is the best support person I have ever had
the occasion to work with - bar none! Her patience
and knowledge is excellent. When I pop tough questions,
she follows through with definitive resolutions and/or
work-arounds. Please give her several Gold Stars if
not a big raise - she deserves it!
J. C.
Reno, NV
Subject: You are GOOOOOD!
Hi Deana,
Your help is always right on target, but your suggestion
that the reason I was not getting all of the text
in a combo box because the box was not being populated
until it was dropped down was stunning.
Thanks so much for your consistently excellent support.
M.R.F.
Plymouth Meeting, PA
Marty,
Thank you for your help yesterday. I also wanted
to mention that was the best support call I have ever
made. Nice work by you, and the WinBatch people. Feel
free to pass this note on to your supervisor, atta
boys are always nice.
B.D.
--Random WinBatch Kudos found on Deja News Borland
Forum--
When I worked as a Co-Op for this company for 6 months,
I was using this product called WinBatch. These were
the best newsgroups I have ever participated in. You
go to their site, and they have an easily navigated
and searchable... past newsgroups question and FAQ
that actually helped!
The examples and questions were very good - lots
of times I found info their and didn't have to go
to the newgroup portion. But, if I did....they had
this guy (who I think was the guy that wrote WinBatch),
answering EVERY newsgroup post. There was never a
newsgroup post that went unanswered. Even if it was
him just saying "Clarify more, and here is my guess".
Even that "guess" alone, puts confidence that somebody
is thinking about my problem. Other people answered
posts, but he was the MAN! Imagine the confidence
you will have, when you post a message in the morning...
and a lot of the time it is answered by the end of
the day (we are talking business hours now). Or if
not the end of the day (or if you post your question
at the end of the day) -- as soon as you get into
work -- you fire up the newsgroups and wow! a GUARANTEED
answer/reply. Those newsgroups were beautiful!!!!
W.C.
Mr. Wilson,
I wanted to take a moment to let you know how much
I appreciate some of the people you have on your staff.
Marty, Laura, Deana - and Chuck Chopp (in a remote
sense) went WAY above the call of duty to help me
with a problem I had been fighting for over a year.
It had to do with WinBatches locking up during login
script processing, and the problem was determined
to be with our Virus software, McAfee. But, that simplifies
it greatly. Their hard work and cooperation and just
plain brain power figured this one out.
In one of my job functions of Software Distribution
for 4000 desktops all over the planet, I have always
waved the Winbatch flag in the face of opponents that
want SMS, WinInstall, NAL, LanDesk and the like to
replace my empire of custom scripts. However, I always
win out when they look at my scripts I have created
versus the other packages. Your staff's level of customer
support is a HUGE factor in this. They allow me to
be the "Scotty" of our Enterprise, where if no one
else can come up with a solution to a problem, they
call on me to do it and expect me to be a "miracle
worker". I have WinBatch scripts running all over
doing everything from monitoring servers to be sure
they function properly - paging administrators if
there is a problem, to moving data from old 16bit
legacy systems into new 32 bit platforms that would
never ordinarily talk to each other. Users love the
colorful and informative screens, ability to decline
installs until they have time, etc.
Thank you again for everything, and kudos to your
staff.
T. J. T.
Thanks for getting this fixed so quickly. It's awesome
the way you turn things around in a couple of hours.
Once again I am pleased our company chose your product.
Thanks again, J.L. -----
To all employees,
I just wanted to take time out of a busy day to
tell you I think your Winbatch program is one of the
most useful software tools I have ever used. With
over 25 years programming experience I've seen a lot
of products come and go, but your product is head
and shoulders above the rest. After using WinBatch
for about a year now, I can honestly say it is about
10x faster to develop a project than with VB.
Finally let me say how impressed I am with your tech
support phone line. I actually get a human to talk
to within 30 seconds anytime of day. And it's someone
who's qualified to answer my questions rather than
a newbie like so many other companies use. Your technical
support staff has always been courteous, ready, willing,
and able to assist me in my questions.
Thank you for being a premium company with an outstanding
product and qualified support. It takes a lot of qualified
employees working together to create and maintain
such an effort. I wish you all the best in your continued
successful business.
Sincerely yours,
D. D.
I have one more comment about your company's tech
support. If anything, it's 'too good'. I've been playing
with WinBatch, on and off, for the last couple of
months. During that time, I regularly scan the webboard
to learn more about the product and to find additional
uses for WinBatch. Very often, I see questions being
posed by people that show they've never looked the
manual!
Winbatch has some very good documentation (both online
and offline). I especially like that examples are
given with each function in the help files. As a tech
support person for a medical software company (whose
user documentation is almost non-existent), it bothers
me to see people not using the extensive resources
provided. Rather than take the time to look thru the
help files, search the support database, & read the
manual...they simply ask on the webboard.
If there is anything I can do to assist you in the
future, please don't hesitate to contact me.
B. M.
Guys (and Girls),
I just wanted to say that I use WinBatch for everything.
I am NOT a programmer by any means, but the ease of
WinBatch, and the Intro to Programming book that I
purchased from ya’ll (yes, I’m from Texas) has improved
my skills and has definitely made me more marketable.
I am able to do things with WinBatch that others marvel
at. I let them think of me as an “NT God” for a while…
then I tell them about WinBatch. Just wanted to say
a HUGE thanks for the version updater, this makes
it tons easier to keep my extenders updated. You have
an awesome product and I now am learning other languages
where before I thought that programming was beyond
my reach. Thanks again guys for making my life easier.
C. M.
I would wish other companies would be as good and
customer friendly as yours.
P. C.
Might I say that I am impressed how quickly Windowware
responded to this bug with a fix. Over the years I
have reported bugs to a few companies and your response
has been one of the quickest. If you need a testimonial
I would be pleased to provide one.
J. S. K.
I've been programming for almost 20 years and can't
remember enjoying a tool as much as I'm enjoying WinBatch.
I purchased the compiler last week and have not been
able to put it down since. Thanks for the great work!!
M. J. C.
P.S. Your support services are great too.
I wanted to say thank you for the example (on the
WinBatch Nearly Psychic Tech Support help archives)
of how to remove a Cntrl Z from the end of file. The
eof marker started causing a problem as we began FTP'ing
files to our mainframe (the pre-FTP upload program
stripped the eof markers). As an old mainframe programmer
who used to feel helpless when confronted with PC
problems that couldn't be handled with DOS commands
(although I guess this problem could be handled with
the DOS Copy /b) I sure appreciate your product. More
so, like so many others, I appreciate your hints and
availability for assistance.
B. B.
Not only is WinBatch + Compiler an excellent product,
but the tech support is super. I was not expecting
a reply to my question so fast. Keep up the good work!
R. B.
I wanted to let you know how very happy I have been
with the service provided by WindowWare. Less than
3 months ago I never would have dreamed that I would
be writing applications and SELLING them. Thanks to
all your folks help, we are in the final stages of
Beta Testing our programs and are due to ship them
by mid-August. Response to our programs has been wonderful
-- and I couldn't have done it without you guys. Please
pass the word around. I am one happy camper.
L. L.
Laura,
The DLL you sent me solved the problem. Thank You!
I haven't tried the code you sent me yet, but I have
tried the Search Extender. It works great!
You and literally EVERY person I have spoken with
on your staff have always been very helpful, patient
and courteous. If I had to judge WinBatch on customer
service alone, it would already be sold. I hope to
have a good working model in a aweek or so to present
to management as a "proof of concept". Once this is
done I'll be calling you for a licensed copy of the
WinBatch + Compiler! Thanks again. :)
C. R.
Portland, OR
WinBatch is my choice for handling all of my automation.
WinBatch has many different "extenders" which can
be downloaded. One of those extenders is the "internet
Extender" which gives you direct access to FTP functions.
I strongly recommend to anyone trying to automate
FTP sessions to look in to WinBatch. Their Technical
Support is exceptional as well.
A. M.
Thanks for your help. I've been bragging about how
good your service is over there. And my coworkers
are impressed with the capabilities of your products.
Overall... great experience working with your company.
T. D.
Talking about support, at this place I'd like to
say that the WinBatch WebBoard offers great support
in amazing quick time. Even big compaines like Oracle
and Microsoft don't reach such a quick time in responding
to users questions.
A. V.
The best place I've found for code examples is here
on the BBS and in the Tech Support area. The best
of the BBS seems to make it into the Tech Support
Database, and it is permanent there. If you can't
find it in either place, just ask. Martin, and the
other gurus from the user community seem very helpful.
And for really tough cases, Martin seems to have a
line on some of the developers and user suggestions
do sometimes make it into the next version!
D. W.
The support at Wilson WindowWare is first rate.
Anytime I have ever had a question or concern I've
been able to find answers within iminutes on the WebBoard
BBS and most recently through free phone support.
In the age of 45 minute to an hour waits, on 1-900-pay-support,
this is very refreshing!
D. W.
Now, if you don't mind a little "testimonial" from
a newbie - I love the product so far and I am really
new at this! I have found the answer to EVERY question,
mostly in your on-line tech support information, which
has lots of helpful sample solutions. I hope you will
keep this database(s) up and continue to add to the
lists as appropriate.
I'm responsible for 30 or more machines on an internal
network and they all run McAfee virus protection software.
Version 5.x of that product doesn't have "automatic"
update built-in like previous versions (scheduler),
so my FIRST WinBatch program is to write the code
necessary to run the McAfee Central program, do the
weekly data file updates and reboot the user's computer.
I'm almost finished writing and testing my script,
THEN I'll take the "big plunge" and come back for
purchase of the Compiler. I plan to use the Windows
task scheduler to run my compiled EXE once a week
- should work, I hope!
Right now, as I develop the code, I'm trying to
identify all the possibilities of interactivity that
might come up (data files already updated, can't reach
McAfee, does the machine need scanning first, etc.)
I never realized until now how many possibilities
of "branches" there are, in writing a program!
Thanks for what seems to be a very comprehensive
product!
A. H.
Just want to express appreciation for WinBatch and
also the technical support you company has provided
since I bought you product 99b, whenever that was.
I used your old version of Winsock and with your
help produced a utility to mirror a local group of
files on my server to handle my home page. Removing
old directories and files on the remote site and I
found it necessary to make a directory before copying
files. Also had to handle a mixture of time and year
dating and date/time differences between the Unix
server and my local machine.
Anyway had fun and am satisfied with the quality
of the utility.
Thanks again for providing a high quality nice to
use product and backing it up with excellent support.
J.C.
In trying to find a way to automate NT administration
functions, I came across WIL - the Windows Interface
Language. With one line of code you can create a complete
GRAPHIC USER INTERFACE to get user input. It is shareware
and you can download a fully functional, non-crippled,
non-timed version from winbatch.com.
WinBatch is the basic scripting engine. Their answer
to simple CGI programming is WebBatch. Their documentation
is complete and their technical support BBS is nothing
less than fantastic!
D.T.
P.S. I have no interest of ANY kind in this product!
My only interest is in trying to get my work done!
