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The often forgotten function in Mastercam, VBScripts! They are the easiest way to automate Mastercam. This was taken from one of our YouTube Live Streams.

This video is pulled from out last live stream. The full stream was roughly an hour long. I started off talking editors, briefly discussed VBScripts and their use in Mastercam, then did QnA for while....oh, and at the end I gave away a couple camInstructor T-Shirts! Join the next live stream, more giveaways to come!

VBScript is a scripting language developed by Microsoft that is modeled on Visual Basic. It's pretty close to the same language that you would see inside of VBA in products such as Microsoft Excel or Word. If you can program in VBA, you can program VBScripts and vise versa. It is an older language, 1996, and is not being further developed.

Even though it is 'dead', I still believe this is the best way to dip your toes in the water of automating Mastercam. Fully automating Mastercam would need you to install Microsofts Visual Studio and then 'connect' it to Mastercam. This can be a bit daunting if you just want to dabble. You would have much more power and access to many more functions through a proper NETHook or Chook, but again, if you just want to play with code, VBScripting is the best way.

Older versions of Mastercam came with Help files and sample codes focused on VBScripts. Unfortuneatley, these files are no longer included. Link below to download these older files for those who are interested. 

VBScripts Files

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