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Windows Operating Systems Software IT

Windows to Have Better CLI 742

MickyJ writes "The command line interface to the Windows Server OS will be changed to the new Monad Shell (MSH), in a phased implementation to take place over the next three to five years. 'It will exceed what has been delivered in Linux and Unix for many years', so says Bob Muglia, a Senior VP at Microsoft." More from the Tom's Hardware article: "The language in Muglia's comment offers the first clear indication that WMI may be yet one more component being left behind, as Microsoft moves away from portions of Windows architecture that have historically been vulnerable to malicious attack."
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Windows to Have Better CLI

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  • Balls? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Grave_Rose ( 715146 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @07:51AM (#12767503)
    Unix have no Monads.

    Gr@ve_Rose
    • Re:Balls? (Score:5, Funny)

      by DenDave ( 700621 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @08:12AM (#12767752)
      And if they did, it would be GPL and probably be called....

      Yep.. gonads...

      GNU/Gonads...

      gonads.org??

    • Re:Balls? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ondrasek ( 637976 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @01:48PM (#12772124) Homepage

      Well... I've played with technological preview of Monad. Being bash addict, I must however admit, that Monad offers functionality beyong imagination of modern Linux shells. It passes objects through pipes instead of text and is strictly object oriented. It uses a model of namespaces, so in Windows, you are able to browse registry, file systems, environment variables, etc. in unified way.

      The authors claim, that it's modelled after the VMS shells. VMS seems to regain its fame in Microsoft, with Windows NT kernel being originally designed by Dave Cutler - a VMS guru.

      Monad really rocks and is worth trying.

  • Way to go! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 09, 2005 @07:51AM (#12767506)
    "The language in Muglia's comment offers the first clear indication that WMI may be yet one more component being left behind, as Microsoft moves away from portions of Windows architecture that have historically been vulnerable to malicious attack."

    1. Write complex management interface
    2. Shore up security holes over many years of use and testing
    3. Ditch for new immature code
    4. ?
    5. Profit!

    If they're ditching WMI it *won't* be for security reasons.
    • Re:Way to go! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by capt.Hij ( 318203 )
      Number three could be expanded to: "ditch for new immature code which will take 3-5 years to implement new technology when completely workable alternatives exist and could be easily adapted." Should it really take a company with Microsoft's resources to take 3-5 years to implement a new scripting language? Are the permissions system that broken that it takes so much effort to plug the holes? Should I stop begging the question?
  • by dyfet ( 154716 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @07:51AM (#12767515) Homepage
    Because they couldnt get a full pair? I found the implications of the name too humorous to pass commenting on...

  • It's about time (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 09, 2005 @07:52AM (#12767523)

    Microsoft ignoring the command line is just as silly as ignoring the Internet. It's only taken them longer to realise because only power-users and sysadmins are affected instead of every user.

    • Re:It's about time (Score:4, Interesting)

      by selderrr ( 523988 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @08:16AM (#12767799) Journal
      what I find the strangest, it that they need so much time to develop it... they have such a pile of cash, and have used it before to pump out software at breakneck speeds (and actually break their neck as with internet explorer) to crush competitors. The fact that this CLI will take so long to develop means that either they don't take it seriously and won't invest big bucks, or means that they take it very seriously and don't want to screw it up again. but even in the last case : the proposed planning is a very careful one
      • Re:It's about time (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ILikeRed ( 141848 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @10:19AM (#12769271) Journal
        Don't forget about your example that Internet Explorer was not originally a Microsoft product:
        • They took the code from a project called Mosiac
        • They made a deal with a company called Spyglass to use their source code from Mosiac
        • The deal was for a small quarterly payment and a big percentage of sales of Internet Explorer
        • They screwed both Netscape and their partner Mosiac by giving it away for free - undercutting the competition and avoiding all royalties to Spyglass - putting them out of business also.
        So maybe they just could not find any BSD based CLI or naive proprietary company to screw out of a good CLI? You have to admit though - that is quite some business innovation - Bill's pure genius at it's best. I heard Spyglass finally got a few million out of their lawsuit. It just amazes me that people don't remember these things.
  • by sammykrupa ( 828537 ) <sam@theplaceforitall.com> on Thursday June 09, 2005 @07:52AM (#12767525) Homepage Journal
    Next Headline on Slashdot:

    Microsoft Pushes Back Longhorn Until 2008 Over New CLI and Changing of "My"
  • vaporware (Score:5, Funny)

    by mattdm ( 1931 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @07:53AM (#12767532) Homepage
    Bah:

    "...will exceed what has been delivered in Linux and Unix for many years. It will take three to five years to fully develop and deliver."

    Somehow I'm not too worried.
    • Re:vaporware (Score:5, Informative)

      by HyperChicken ( 794660 ) * on Thursday June 09, 2005 @07:56AM (#12767563)
      It's not "vaporware"; It actually exists. You can get in on the beta for free.

      http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel 9.MSHWiki [msdn.com] - How to sign up
      • ** It's not "vaporware"; It actually exists. You can get in on the beta for free.**

        why does it take 3 to 5 years to develope it to exceed what has been shipped with linux for ages then?
      • Re:vaporware (Score:3, Interesting)

        by mattdm ( 1931 )
        It's not "vaporware"; It actually exists. You can get in on the beta for free.

        Yeah, I actually looked at some of the sample code before posting. The "vapor" part is the in-three-to-five-years-this'll-be-better-than-Unix claim -- right now, from what I've seen, they would have been far better served to go with bash. (Excepting of course their license issues.)
    • Even if it's not vaporware, I have a hard time believing what Unix and Linux have had available to them via bash, csh, etc over all these years will somehow be trumped by some new shell created by Microsoft of all people in no time at all.

      Right, because endless feedback, coding, feature requests, bug squashing, and use of the *nix shells for how many years now isn't worth anything.

      Open mouth, insert foot.
      • Re:vaporware (Score:3, Insightful)

        by rpozz ( 249652 )
        Yes, I totally agree. Linux/UNIX shells have been developed, tested and improved by hundreds (thousands?) of people who use them repeatedly every day over the course of more than 20 years. How the hell is MS going to make something superior in 3-5?
        • Re:vaporware (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Eric604 ( 798298 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @08:07AM (#12767693)
          Because they can rip off Linux/UNIX shells that have been developed, tested and improved by hundreds (thousands?) of people over the course of more than 20 years?
        • Re:vaporware (Score:5, Insightful)

          by LarsWestergren ( 9033 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @09:03AM (#12768327) Homepage Journal
          Linux/UNIX shells have been developed, tested and improved by hundreds (thousands?) of people who use them repeatedly every day over the course of more than 20 years. How the hell is MS going to make something superior in 3-5?

          I hate to be in any way sticking up for Microsoft, but don't underestimate the value of starting from a clean slate.

          Apple has done some pretty nifty things, for instance launcd [slashdot.org] . I know it's not popular with everyone, but I think it was pretty cool replacing all these different scipts and daemons, and having one XML based config file. They simplified by daring to question established wisdom (the "We've always done it this way so it must be perfect" mindset.)
    • Actually (Score:5, Interesting)

      by bmajik ( 96670 ) <matt@mattevans.org> on Thursday June 09, 2005 @08:59AM (#12768281) Homepage Journal
      i saw an early alpha over 2 years ago. I was blown away.

      Note that prior to joining MS, i did admin and development work on linux, solaris, irix, and even hp-ux. i know my way around a unix shell pretty well. I started making noise a few years back about how awful cmd.exe is and how we need a real scriptable admin experience. Some people said "go check this out". I was blown away at what they already had.

      There are some things about MSH that are really, really good. I'm looking forward to it. I'm frustrated that a lot of the early momentum it had seems to have fizzled and its now bogged down in "product development" :/ The early alphas were releasable, imo. Especially compared to cmd.exe, which is squarely awful :)

  • Hmm... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Sinryc ( 834433 )
    Now, I don't know much about this but I do have a few questions. What all will this be likely to change? Also, once the biggest company in the world uses it, how will it be so secure? If so many people are using it, arent they more likely to find problems with it? Or am I just uneducated?
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 09, 2005 @07:54AM (#12767537)
    They change their entire platforms over 2 years, and MS will spend 3-5 years changing the default shell? :p
  • ooooh (Score:3, Insightful)

    by geoffspear ( 692508 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @07:55AM (#12767553) Homepage
    In only 3 to 5 years, they'll be able to develop technology that's better than what exists today? What innovation!

    How about announcing great new technology that actually works today?

    • You obviously missed the CLI Clippy announcement, or Typpy as he is to be now known.
    • Actually, if you look at the logic from what MS has said, they just admitted that UNIX shells are better that Microsoft shells. They have promised something better, but that admission by itself reveals the depth of fear-and-loathing they have for UNIX.

      Sorry your shot of cash to Bay didn't work out better for you, Bill*.

      (*Not really...)
    • Re:ooooh (Score:5, Informative)

      by metlin ( 258108 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @08:12AM (#12767750) Journal
      The beta has been available for sometime now [msdn.com] - apparently you need Win2003 or .Net v2 for it to be installed.

      From someone I know who uses it:
      • Very slow, but the scripting was sweet, though not as compact as unix
      • Reminds you of a bastard child of unix+VMS
      • You can write commands in C#, kinda like servlets where you can extend a base class
      • It's an OO way of doing things, but unlike Perl/Python which are screenscrapers, Monad scripts can pipe out and pipe in objects - and everything happens through typed vars, not screenscraping.
      • Re:ooooh (Score:5, Interesting)

        by dysprosia ( 661648 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @08:36AM (#12767996)
        Monad scripts can pipe out and pipe in objects

        This is trivial to implement with a programming language that supports serialization, esp. if it can serialize to stdin/stdout.. In Objective-C, it's a simple matter of objc_open_typed_stream(stdin, OBJC_READONLY); and objc_open_typed_stream(stdout, OBJC_WRITEONLY); and read:'ing and write:'ing to the stream.
      • Re:ooooh (Score:3, Informative)

        by ByteSlicer ( 735276 )
        unlike Perl/Python which are screenscrapers, Monad scripts can pipe out and pipe in objects

        I'm sure a Python app can send serialized (pickled) objects to a stdio pipe.
  • Better than Bash? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AnriL ( 657435 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @07:55AM (#12767556)
    Better than Bash? I guess they'll be using Zsh then. :-)
  • by Weaselmancer ( 533834 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @07:57AM (#12767580)

    ...you just gotta go download it from here. [cygwin.com]

  • by Roofus ( 15591 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @07:59AM (#12767604) Homepage
    Unless I can get transparent terminals. That is what really holds back MS in the server market. I mean, how useful is a shell unless you can see through it?
    • True transparent terminals? I'm still waiting for those in Linux!
      • Still waiting? Why?

        I've got an infinite number of transparent terminals up on the desktop already. Each time I start one I can't find the damn close icon to shut it down...
  • And it's vera nice!

    Can you say bash from cygwin?!? thought you could
  • You mean a CLI that you can cut, copy, and paste to/from? Innovation!

    About time MS got on the fucking ball in terms of CLI.

    • Re:Cut/Copy/Paste (Score:3, Informative)

      by ssj_195 ( 827847 )
      You can already copy from/ paste to Window's default CLI (highlight text and press ENTER to copy; right-click to paste - same with cygwin). I don't know about cutting, though.
  • I do not care about the PR spin being put on this announcement it is a really good thing for Microsoft. The thing I hate about administering a Windows server is that I have to run their terminal services in order to get remote access.

    I am on dialup. A good command line interface for remote support? All I can say is HOT DAMN.
  • See monad and think that it's going to be an emasculated, one testicled command shell that no real man would ever touch out of a jealous regard for the family jewels?
  • Everyone who read the Wikipedia article on Longhorn, or indeed on Monad has known about this for a long, long time.
  • Is this the death of the legacy DOS commands that we have all used?

    Will the c: conventions be replaced (or simply aliased) alias d:='mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/cdrom' ??

    or EVEN WORSE: will I have to swap all my "\" to "/" =)
    Are they finally moving to A Better Place(tm) ?

  • It exists. Unfortunately, it is nasty to use. Commands are long and it makes heavy use of COM (So much for .NET). I have no doubt that it will be heavily exploited by virii and phishers. So I don't think bash is in any danger of being replaced.
  • Microsoft Shell (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Actually, MSH has been available for public beta (if you're enrolled in MSDN, anyway) for quite some time now -- I've been using it on my Windows XP box at home just to test it out. In general.. yes, it's actually quite good, and up to the standard of Bash for most tasks. It's a huge step away from the WinXP command prompt, and represents something of a climbdown for Microsoft, who said they would be moving away from the CLI in future OSes. In addition, it may amuse the /. readers (it certainly amused me
  • Isn't this just a case of: "Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it -- badly". -- Henry Spencer.
    Soon they'll be storing config in files, and have a CLI only version of their server.
    • by Jason Earl ( 1894 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @09:35AM (#12768703) Homepage Journal

      Heck, this is probably what's taking them so long to actually release Monad. It's one thing to create a scripting language, it's another thing completely to create hooks that allow you to actually administer systems with the scripting language. UNIX has the advantage that A) everything is a file, and B) nearly all configuration files are some sort of structured text.

      Microsoft is all excited about being able to pipe objects on the command line, but that's really only because that's what Microsoft has to work with. All of the information that you want is locked up in some poorly documented binary file somewhere that was designed to be accessed from some sort of GUI. The beauty of UNIX's strategy is that I don't have to read some sort of API for a certain configuration object. Instead I simply eyeball the text files and use a vast array of text manipulation tools to do what needs doing.

  • Yeah, but (Score:2, Insightful)

    Microsoft has never "gotten" regular expressions, and I doubt they're about to. Also, there's still the silly reliance on the file extension to tell the operating system how to handle a particular file.
  • by bheer ( 633842 ) <rbheerNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday June 09, 2005 @08:10AM (#12767722)
    For all the 13-year olds on /. who think they're funny, here's where the word monad really comes from [newadvent.org].

  • MSH: QuickRef (Score:5, Informative)

    by nighty5 ( 615965 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @08:14AM (#12767770)
    A quick list of functions and examples, looks very Bourne.

    http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel 9.MSHQuickStart [msdn.com]

    Its about bloody time.

    VBS is a peice of crap, and is way to complicated for what should be simple tasks, MSH looks pretty damn promising.
  • by kisrael ( 134664 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @08:17AM (#12767817) Homepage
    There are two and a half things that bug the hell out of me with the current CLI:

    1. The tab completion behavior (the 'half' part of my 2 1/2 gripes is sometimes you have to fiddle with a registry setting to turn on tab completion). A unix shell (well, the one I'm used to, not even sure which) will complete only up to the point where its unique, and then I can hit Ctrl-D to see possible completions. A lot more predictable than tabbing through all completions that might fit what you've typed...the distinction between "characters I typed myself" and "characters showing up because I'm cycling through" has no visual cue, even though it completely controls what files get shown.

    2. up arrow behavior. It took me a while to finally "get" the logic of Windows...if you type command A, then command B, then command C, then arrow back up to B and run that, pressing down will then take you to C and up will take you to A. I think that it's meant to cover a long sequence of commands that you do over and over, so you don't have to keep uparrowing, but just pressing down once per repeated command, but its much harder to keep a mental model of.

    Both of these things are classic Window's trade off of predictability for perceived "user friendliness". I think hackers often prefer predicitability and ease of mental modeling, since they can always make it easier by some scripting or whatever.

    On the other hand, I like that I can add "\.." to the end of a filename and get to its directory. That's something that seems logical to me that Unix shells don't generally do.
    • by Tim C ( 15259 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @08:51AM (#12768194)
      I would suggest that the reason you find them unpredictable and counter-intuitive is that you're used to the way your preferred Unix shell does things.

      If you liken up-arrowing in the command history to up-arrowing in a text file, if you make an edit in the file, your cursor doesn't magically fly down to the bottom of the file, it stays where it is. That, I suspect, is the reasoning behind the Windows command shell's behaviour - it stays where you left it. Think of it as editing the list of executed commands.
  • by thenerdgod ( 122843 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @08:33AM (#12767965) Homepage
    But will they swap \ for / ? THAT's what I want. The entire cosmos now uses /. er... '/'. ...though I suspect the entire cosmos DOES use /. to blather about their preferred operating system and how kids in trenchcoats are being oppressed by jonkatz or... something...
  • by spauldo ( 118058 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @08:51AM (#12768190)
    I haven't looked at the specs, since I don't work much with windows servers anymore, but I'm curious: one of the major advantages with UNIX boxes is that most of the software you work with has some sort of CLI, or at least has hooks that can read data produced from the command line.

    Windows, on the other hand, has always been particularly bad about that - most apps don't have any support for that sort of thing. Scripting in the windows world has been fairly pointless. Sure, a lot of sysadmin tasks can be performed using the command line, but limitations in the shell make that a pain in the ass. CMD.exe isnt' anywhere near UNIX shells as far as programmability is concerned, and windows lacks the plethora of command line shell enhancing utilities (i.e. sed, grep, etc.) that makes the UNIX shell environment so useful?

    This is talking about using COM and .NET classes - will we finally be able to hook into more applications and actually do useful things at the command line now, or will this mainly benefit programmers who are trained in OO concepts rather than sysadmins?
  • by ArsenneLupin ( 766289 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @08:53AM (#12768210)
    No story about Microsoft and Unixy shells is complete without the following anecdote:
    One of those magical Microsoft moments(tm) happened yesterday and I thought that I'd share. Non-geeks may not find this funny at all, but those in geekdom (particularly UNIX geekdom) will appreciate it.

    Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager (henceforth MPM), was holding forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix style scripting and shell services on NT for compatibility and to leverage UNIX expertise that moves to the NT platform. The product suite includes the MMS (Mortise Money Systems) windowing Monad shell, a windowing PERL, and lots of goodies like awk, sed and grep. It actually fills a nice niche for which other products (like the MMS suite) have either been too highly priced or not well enough integrated.

    An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room and asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their choice of Monad shell. He asks if they had considered others that are more compatible with existing UNIX versions of MSH.

    The MPM said that the MMS shell was pretty compatible and should be able to run all UNIX scripts.

    The questioner again asserted that the MMS shell was not very compatible and didn't do a lot of things right that are defined in the MSH language spec.

    The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and should work quite well.

    This assertion and counter assertion went back and forth for a bit, when another fellow member of the audience announced to the MPM that the questioner was, in fact Peter Monad of AT&T (now Lucent) Bell Labs. (Peter Monad is the author of the Monad shell)

    Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one of the only times that I have seen a (by then pink cheeked) MPM lost for words or momentarily lacking the usual unflappable confidence. So, what's a body to do when Microsoft reality collides with everyone elses?

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 09, 2005 @08:59AM (#12768277)
    C:\> winword.exe
    .___
    // \
    ||@@|
    || ||
    |\_||
    \__/
    _||_

    It looks like you're trying to run a program. Would you like me to start WINWORD.EXE? [Y/N]
    ---
    (courtesy of mopslik [slashdot.org]. Original post [slashdot.org].
  • why not posix? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by yagu ( 721525 ) <yayagu.gmail@com> on Thursday June 09, 2005 @09:11AM (#12768424) Journal

    I seem to remember Microsoft's new "scripting" and CLI mentioned before, and descriptions of its powerful features. Basically it was described as object-oriented in architecture with claims of superior technology then!

    From the article: Monad was started as a project to provide a more powerful command line competitive with the BASH shell on Unix and Linux, using ideas gleaned from WMIC, but using the .NET Framework as its core component instead.

    What concerns me is not Microsoft's improvement of their technology, especially their CLI (as a long time forced-to-use-DOS CLI, believe me, it's long needed the overhaul), but Microsoft's yet another implementation of a primitive that goes against quasi standards, albeit in this case a fairly high level standard.

    I wonder why they wouldn't implement a POSIX compliant shell... that would go oh so far to allow portability of apps across platforms. Instead they come up with their idea of CLI.

    I know there's always cygwin to handle POSIX scripts, but I find it slow, and difficult to manage effectively in the morass that is Windows. Certainly a POSIX-like interface in Window's CLI would attract more scripters if Microsoft supplied their own native implementation.

    Otherwise, what is the motivation? Once again, with Microsoft's leverage and monopoly, it feels like a new "product", that if they can leverage with their monopoly, they continue their assimilation of another niche in the marketplace.

  • by cahiha ( 873942 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @09:27AM (#12768604)
    Monad is the usual bloated, overly complicated "me too" product Microsoft comes up with. In fact, Monad isn't really even a shell, it's more like Tcl/Tk or perlsh. Linux has nothing to fear from this sort of thing; there are good reasons why everybody still uses the sh family of shells after 30 years despite lots of attempts at "improving" on it.

    If Microsoft wanted to come up with a decent shell, they should carefully look at bash and rc, and figure out a minimal set of changes to make it compatible with their non-standard parameter and pathname syntax, and leave it at that. Or they should make careful, incremental changes to the current command interpreter.
  • Apocryphal Story (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Epeeist ( 2682 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @10:11AM (#12769189) Homepage
    There is an apocryphal story about someone from MKS and an MS flack giving a joint presentation on their UNIX toolkit for Windows.

    During the bit about KSH an old guy at the back kept piping up with comments like "that feature wasn't implemented properly" and "that doesn't conform to the specification". Apparently the MS flack expostulated a lot and try to cast doubt on the old guy's qualifications. It was only then that it was pointed to him that the person making the comments was David Korn.
  • It's great (Score:3, Funny)

    by lelitsch ( 31136 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @12:01PM (#12770626)
    bash:

    echo $PATH

    Monad:

    Private Sub echo1_CLI(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As
    System.EventArgs) Handles echo1.CLI

    Try

    AddHandler EchoCL1.PrintLine, AddressOf Me.PrintCL1_PrintLine
    PrintLine1.Print(Sys.Init.Windows.PATH)
    Catch ex As Exception
    Message.Show("An error occurred while printing PATH ", _
    ex.ToString())

    End Try
  • by Alex Belits ( 437 ) * on Thursday June 09, 2005 @03:02PM (#12773123) Homepage
    This "shell" has command line input (that is, continuous text that is parsed to determine its meaning and run other executables), yet the communication over "pipes" is in "objects" that have to drag around their methods, so the whole flexibility, simplicity, parsing and isolation of data source from receiver (that, if someone forgot, provides security) go right out of the window. Oh, and it allows to access various system data hierarchies -- too bad, Windows has so many of them.

    The whole Unix design is based on the idea of unified file descriptor and a single filesystem tree. Windows still lacks those, and this shell is not even trying to emulate them (like what cygwin does).
  • Monad leverages WMI (Score:3, Informative)

    by jsnover ( 890842 ) on Thursday June 09, 2005 @04:35PM (#12774105)
    The article is completely correct when it states that Monad started with the ideas from WMIC and then applied those ideas to .NET. It is however, incorrect to think that this means that WMI is in any way being "left behind". Of the issues Admins had with WMIC is that to do non-trival processing of WMI object, you had to use XSLT or use WSH (e.g. VBSCRIPT). With Monad, Admins get full, admin-focused, command-oriented, language to manipulate WMI (as well as .NET, ADO, ADSI, XML and OLE Automation objects). It might be appropriate to compare and contrast the capabilities of Monad and WMIC but not Monad and WMI. WMI is a management infrastructure, Monad is an environment to present those capabilities via command line scripting. Said another way, the value of writing new WMI providers (and the value of existing WMI providers) increases with the availability of Monad. Jeffrey Snover Monad Architect

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