Microsoft Command Shell "Monad"

Sunil Jagadish — Sun, 10 Jul 2005 07:39:00 GMT

What is Monad?
Monad is the new command line shell developed by Microsoft. Microsoft does come out with interesting codenames for its products, which reminds me of the Whisteler, Longhorn and Blackcomb funda.

I got this from wikipedia-

The word monad comes from the Greek word µ???? (from the word µ????, which means "one", "single", "unique") and has had many meanings in different contexts.

Goal of Monad is to deliver an extensible scripting environment that is secure,interactive, programmable and production-ready to enable consistent and reliable automation of administrative tasks.

Some key things about it:

A Scripting Language called Msh Script
An interactive shell called Msh.exe
SDK to produce task-oriented commands and providers
A set of domain independent utility commands
A mechanism to do remote scripting.

If you are wondering how to get your hands on a copy of this, visit the Microsoft Betas Site. Arul Kumaravel (a Dev Lead at Microsoft) posted a Quick Start for those who want to get started with Monad. The essence of object-orientedness can be seen in the syntax and usage. Eg.: $a.SubString(0,3). Someone did complain that Monad has been left out in the PDC '05 agenda.