Winter Scripting Games: Profiles in Perfection
Marcus L. Farmer
As part of the 2008 Winter Scripting Games the Script Center is profiling competitors who recorded a perfect score in the 2007 Scripting Games. Here, in his own words, is a little something about Marcus Farmer, who received a perfect score in the VBScript Advanced division.
Check out more Profiles in Perfection from the 2007 Scripting Games.
Marcus L. Farmer
Greetings from Maryville, Tennessee in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains where I live with my beautiful wife and wonderful little 2-year-old son. When I'm not scripting, my life is filled with family, church, singing, and gaming (mostly FPSs).
I've been interested in computers going back to the days of typing out long lines of code for my Commodore VIC 20 and saving it to a cassette tape. Through the years I got to play with some newer technologies (Apple IIe, IBM clones, etc.). I got started in VBScript as a result of going to an ASP class. A lot of the code used in the pages was suspiciously familiar to the .VBS files I had seen, so I began using VBScript to perform some small tasks around the office. Those skills helped me later on to develop one of the largest scripts I've ever created: a hardware inventory script that remotely retrieves information from all 300 computers in the organization and saves it to a SQL database.
I am currently an owner of KBX Group, Inc., a company that creates eCommerce software for large online retailers. Here, scripting has helped with a myriad of items from monitoring and server task automation to replication of data and website content.
So far I'm not extraordinarily enthused about Windows PowerShell and I still do all of my scripting in VBScript or batch files wrappers; however, I hope that some training will help me over that. I'm really looking forward to this year's Scripting Games.
Tips
| • | Ask questions. No one knows it all and no one ever will, but it is important to know what to ask and where to find answers when you need them. |
| • | Know the difference between a sub and a function and when to use them. |
| • | Get involved with a good scripting community such as the TechNet Script Center or ScriptingAnswers.com. |
| • | Reuse code. If you don't have a script editor that has an integrated snippet feature at least save your code snippets as text files for reuse later. |
| • | Comments. Just put them in - you'll thank yourself later; someone else may thank you later, too. |
| • | Naming convention. Whatever you choose to name your variables, do so with consistency and make their names meaningful to what they contain; strInputFileName is a lot better than x for a variable name. (We're not talking Algebra, ya know.) |
| • | On Error Resume Next. It's not always your friend; it’s often better to know that the script has bombed instead of thinking that everything is OK. |
