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The Starter Script Editor

The Starter Script Editor allows you to make and edit your own starter scripts that you can later use with DISMTools. It can be accessed from one of the following locations:

  • By opening the starter script browser from the post-installation scripts section of the unattended answer file creation wizard, and clicking "Create your own starter scripts..."
  • By going to Tools > Create a starter script (versions 0.8 and newer)
  • Independently, by opening StarterScriptEditor.exe located in <program directory>\tools\StarterScriptEditor

You should see the following window:

Usage

When you launch the Starter Script Editor, you will be able to create a new starter script, or open an existing one by clicking "Open" from the toolbar.

To create a new Starter Script you will need to input information regarding the name, the description, the underlying script language, and the script code itself. You can use the following languages in your starter script:

When writing the script code, you can click "Import Existing Script..." to open a script that you may already have and that you want to use as the base for your starter script. Keep in mind, however, that, by using this option, you are replacing existing code in the starter script with the code of the script to import.

Click the Save button and specify a name for the starter script file to save it.

Opening the Starter Script Editor from DISMTools presents an improvement. After working on your starter scripts and closing the editor, DISMTools will reload all starter scripts to pull in the new ones. That means that you can use these the moment you close the Starter Script Editor, as opposed to having to close and reopen DISMTools.

When working on starter scripts, you decide which versions of DISMTools you want them to be compatible with by choosing the appropriate format version by clicking Configure target script version:

Then, select the version of DISMTools you want the starter script to be compatible with:

When working with large script codebases, it may be hard to find the code you are looking for. Pressing Ctrl + F will open the search dialog.

The Find dialog operates in 2 modes: Find, and Find & Replace. To invoke the latter mode, either toggle the "Replace Mode" button, or press Ctrl + R. Both operation modes can operate in either case-sensitive mode, regex mode, or both.

Use the "Find Next" and "Find Previous" buttons to navigate through the results of your search. Press "Find All" to display all occurrences of your search term in a list.

When you're in the "Find & Replace" mode, with content selected, you can click "Replace" to replace the selected occurrence and advance to the next occurrence (or wrap around to the first occurrence if you were at the last one), or click "Replace All" to replace all occurrences of your search term in the script code.

Warning

Replace operations are irreversible. There is no undo functionality.

Find mode Find & Replace mode

When your script contains functions or labels, you can easily jump to them by clicking the "Document Outline" button in the main window, or by pressing Ctrl + Alt + T.

Independently of the language you are using, you can configure the language mode of the Document Outline viewer to one of the 4 supported languages. Then, select a function or label from the "Navigate to function/label" field. Finally, click "Navigate":

For VBScript code, selecting a function will also show you details about its signature:

Sharing your starter scripts with the world

Leverage the Starter Script Library to make your starter scripts available to the world. To upload your starter script to the Starter Script Library, click "Upload Script" and follow the instructions. You will need to have a GitHub account to upload your starter script, plus an API key. Both steps are explained by the Starter Script Editor.

To prevent leaking sensitive information, you should perform inspection of your starter script. Leverage automated inspection features in the Starter Script Editor to check for sensitive information, such as API keys, passwords, and other secrets. Click "Inspect Script Security" to perform the inspection. If any sensitive information is found, you will see results:

Double-click an entry to jump to the line where the sensitive information was found. By default, the Starter Script Editor contains 100 rules for detecting sensitive information, but you can add your own rules by clicking "Customize Inspection Rules". Define your custom rules by using regular expressions. Here is an example of a custom rule:

Running on older versions of Windows

DISMTools includes 2 versions of the Starter Script Editor that contain the same feature set but target different frameworks:

  • The main version targets .NET 4.8 and works on Windows 7 SP1 and later (except Windows 10 1507/1511). The source code of this version is available on the GitHub repository

  • An alternative version targets .NET 2 and works on operating systems as old as Windows 98 Second Edition. The source code of this version is available as a ZIP file in the repository

    Net20 SSE

    Starter Script Editor on Windows 2000

Command line usage

The command line arguments of the Starter Script Editor are as follows:

StarterScriptEditor.exe /dtss="file"

The Starter Script Format

Starter scripts (with the DTSS extension) are stored as simple text files that you can open in any text editor. The format is as follows:

Language: <language>
Name: <name>
Description: <description>
<script code>

Format Version History

Version Used by DISMTools versions Changes
1.2 0.8 Preview 4+ Added a customizable field for better telling the user about customizable settings
1.1 0.7.2 Preview 3 - 0.8 Preview 3 Added name and description fields to the starter scripts
1.0 0.7.1 Preview 2 - 0.7.2 Preview 2 Initial version