What I am about to say could have long-lasting, deep repercussions throughout the developer community. I am about to devulge a secret held dear by nearly every VB programmer in the world:

VB COM IS BUTT-EASY!

The task at hand: given 2 identical directories on 2 machines, verify their integrity.

Firstly, I tracked down a program which would handle hashing on the files. I used Fsum. Just add Fsum.exe to the path, and run it as scheduled task. It will dump nice little files with the MD5 hash values of each file.

I had written a script in ASP to read both text files and compare the hashes, but I figured this would be a perfect time to learn some VB COM, since the output of the script was an email, and would never be interactively called. Took less than 2 hours.

Basically, if you can write VBScript classes, and are familiar with VB’s particular brand of lunacy, moving to VB COM is a baby step.