VBScript began as part of the Microsoft Windows Script Technologies, which were launched in 1996, initially targeted at web developers. During a period of just over two years, the VBScript and JScript languages advanced from version 1.0 to 2.0, and over that time it gained support from Windows system administrators seeking an automation tool more powerful than the batch language first developed in the late 1970s.

In version 5.0, the functionality of VBScript was increased with new features such as: regular expressions; classes; the With statement[3]; the Eval, Execute, and ExecuteGlobal functions to evaluate and execute script commands built during the execution of another script; a function-pointer system via GetRef[4], and Distributed COM (DCOM) support.

In version 5.5, SubMatches[5] were added to the regular expression class in VBScript, to finally allow VBScript script authors to capture the text within the expression's groups. That capability before was only possible through JScript. With the advent of the .NET framework, the scripting team took the decision to implement future support for VBScript within ASP.NET for web development[6], and therefore no new versions of the VBScript engine would be developed and it moved over to being supported by Microsoft's Sustaining Engineering Team, who are responsible for bug fixes and security enhancements. For Windows system administrators, Microsoft suggests that they migrate to Windows PowerShell. However the scripting engine will continue to be shipped with future releases of Microsoft Windows and IIS.