Monad Shell

Microsoft's DOS replacement for command line interface was demoed today at TechED in Orlando. Here are some quotes from a THG article that appeared yesterday (Snover is the architect doing the demo).

"As Snover told us, his favorite element of Monad is its "three cascading user experiences," which he characterized as operator mode for DOS-style commands, simple scripting mode (similar to bash and ksh scripts), and sophisticated scripting on the order of Perl, Python, and Lisp."

"Snover described its key objective as enabling 100 percent of administrator functions through the command line. So conceivably, a Windows Server administrator will be able to manage an entire enterprise without ever touching a GUI."

Looks like MS is trying to go away from the GUI for their server software?? They will have to restructure all those MCS* classes......

BETA gets released next week to some developers that kissed ass to Gates. First actually shipping is supposedly with Exchange 12 (second half 06). As long as they don't screw this up too bad, it looks to be promising...

it sounds promising and could be very good.

it could also suck ass.

Let us see what happens.

Does it support regular expressions ?

No idea, Monad is being demoed today, so we can expect to see some articles with more detail next week. All I know is that microsoft will be using very simple verb-noun expressions.... like 'get-users' or 'stop-process'. Like I said, microsoft has a list of developers that will receive beta tests of Monad next week, so we are likely to see a decent review of this DOS replacement's beta by the end of month.

It's either gonna be a step forward or a waste of time

The real change here, aside from ditching the GUI is a new scripting language being introduced with Monad. Apparently designed to compete with bash. Not too many details are out yet, but the general consensus in my circles is that this is going to be a flop. It appears that MS is trying to create a replacement for bash, and, let's be honest, MS never gets it right the first, second, or even third time. I would love to see a true CLI, especially a useful one with advanced scripting, but... only time will tell.