“Monad, also known more formally as the MSH Command Shell, is a next generation Windows command shell. Built on top of the .NET Framework, MSH provides a powerful infrastructure for the automation of a wide range of administrative tasks. At last, the command line is a first-class citizen in the world of Windows system management.”
Part one describes how commandline adminstration can be faster for handling multiple machines than GUI adminstration. It also describes top and man/info, I mean get-process and get-help.
As interesting as part one is I will hold off until I see more. MSH scripting and command parsing is what is supposed to be unique and they haven’t gotten that far yet.
When Microsoft says something is “unique”, anti-MS fanboys usually jump on the train screaming “But *nix has had that for 20 years!”
Now, I’m not calling you a fanboy, but you should all remember that when Microsoft says something is unique, they usually mean unique to the Windows world — and in this case, it’s 100% true. Let’s not bash them for improving their product, because we bash them when they don’t as well.
If you actually read what was written you would see that yes I did make fun of them, I also pointed out I wanted to know more. The good stuff of MSH and whether or not it will be useful has yet to be shown.
You have to start somewhere though.
[i]When Microsoft says something is “unique”, anti-MS fanboys usually jump on the train screaming “But *nix has had that for 20 years!” <i/>
And they are right.
You are a tool.
Go away.
Exactly the level of intelligent remark one would expect from somebody who would assign themselves a surname of, “Poo”.
And they’re still right.
However, Microsoft isn’t competing against the Windoze world. They’re competing against *nix.
On the server front, maybe. Desktop Linux is just an itch for them, nothing more.
Microsoft has no reason to worry about desktop Linux, considering how far ahead Vista already is.
As interesting as part one is I will hold off until I see more. MSH scripting and command parsing is what is supposed to be unique and they haven’t gotten that far yet.
You can get more info on MSH scripting and related topics at the links below:
Windows SDK
http://windowssdk.msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/Monad_GettingSta…
Technet Scripting Center
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/hubs/msh.mspx
Monad Blog
http://blogs.msdn.com/monad/
is the way to go. I heard that every management gui in windows longhorn server will have an equivalent command line cmdlets to do those tasks.
Thats the way to do it. Goooooooooooo Microsoft..
Not to start a flame war, but MS has spent years telling us that the command line is a waste of time, it’s old and out of place. First thing they do is update the command line. LOL!
Wish they could make an OS as good at their marketing dept. It would be Super OS.
Care to point out any places where Microsoft said command line is useless?
Stop talking out of your a$$. Microsoft even made Services for Unix available for so many years.
They understand the importance of command line and they did have vbscript/jscript with Windows Scripting host to do a lot of command line work. Now they are unifying a lot of that stuff.
If you are ignorant, it doesn’t mean the whole world around you is wrong. Only you are wrong.
Please, I started in the business as a Banyan and Novell admin!
The thing that MS reps used to come to us to push their products and their MAIN selling point was that companies would save money getting away from cryptic commands in UNIX and Novell and going with the strong GUI that was Windows.
Just like they used to push the original Windows NT domain layout and structure over Novell and Banyans LDAP directory services, and then as soon as Banyan was gone and Novell was down, what does MS do, they come out with that weak Active Directory crap.
The only reason MS pushed the Unix services for Windows was to try and keep people from going to Linux. Not because they believe it was something worth while to do!
While you are pondering over what they heck Banyan is I will look for some old MS articles on the subject!
Ok?
Cool.LOL!
The difference is that the command-line is a complement to the gui tools. AFAIK, the GUI tools don’t even reply on the command-line versions, but the same codebase that the command-line versions do.
With nix, there is (or was) a lot of things that you HAD to use the command-line for.
Microsoft is just giving admins another choice to do the job.
There is nothing wrong with that.
LOL! *rolls eyes*
Actually what MS did for a long time was to get people to pay a bunch of money to buy their products by making the savings to the customer off my back.
Basicly MS watered down the support site of the computer industry by doing 2 things:
1. Making it so easy to get your MCSE that anyone could get one.
2. Making it so simple to admin that a lot of companies dont even pay admins anymore, they just get their A+ cert PC techs to do the work.
Yes, that is good and saves money for companies in the short term (Till something goes wrong!) Then people have to look long, high and wide for a good admin to come clean things up!
And now MS is going to come back and say, “Well guess what we are now going to make and interface that you can type cryptic commands into while in Windows, that will be native to Windows!” LOL!
And we all know it’s all because of Linux that they had to do it. It’s not something they are doing because it’s the best way of doing things. LOL!
Sales and Marketing people are idiots.
Again, my point is that you don’t have to type cryptic commands. You can do it all through GUI still.
I’m not sure what the rest of your post was trying to say..
I was not saying that you could not still use the GUI etc.
My point was that once apon a time it took actual knowledge to be an admin, not just point and click done.
You actually needed to know what commands were for, what they did, how they worked together etc, etc.
Microsoft came along and said “Hey you don’t need to pay that guy who knows all that 100,000 a year, you can get your PC tech to do almost the same tasks and pay them to do two jobs, network admin and PC tech. Save yourself tons of money in admin costs while you pay us a ton of money.”
Never mind that you have to reboot your servers often like in NT3, 4 and 2000. Never mind that you have to deal with a lack of security etc! You won’t have that big paycheck anymore.
And companies went for it. Now all of a sudden you are telling us that hey the command line is important again, not only important but we are going to make one that has a LOT of cryptic commands just like Unix used to. It’s gonna be powerful (Like Unix has been) and important so check it out.
And people jump on it like it’s some new holy grail. LOL! Funny!
Now you’re just going off on a tangent.
No one is acting like it’s the holy grail. But it’s a good thing, so people appreciate that it’s being developed. What is wrong with that? Are you just bitter that people are happy about something being done in Windows?
Warning, this is a rant with no valuable info.
No one is acting like it’s the holy grail
Excuse me ??!!!!!
The very first time I heard about Monad, it was an article saying that the Linux shell is sh*t compared to the wonderful Monad thing. Before saying people other than Windows shills act like it’s holy grail, you’d better go shut off all the Windows zealots on the net that were fast to say bash is shit compared to Monad. You’ll have a hard job too, to update all the Windows trolls that still say using the command line is backwards. Because I won’t hesitate a moment to make them remember that one of the next big thing in Vista is a decent shell (well, Monad still never appeared to me to be decent till this day).
You know, the net is a very good reflection of the abuse I take from Windows admins that think they know everything.
But it’s a good thing, so people appreciate that it’s being developed. What is wrong with that? Are you just bitter that people are happy about something being done in Windows?
Now that’s funny, trying to reverse the situation ?
I predicted (actually no, I did not, I just know very well the patterns of MS ans its shills) that it would happen.
The pattern is simple : Windows shills won’t acknowledge anything that’s better in Linux, but as soon as MS does it, it’s better than in Linux. They won’t even wait to see the thing for real to say such nonsense, as soon as the MS heads announce the product, they think it’s god making predictions and that it will happen (another pattern of MS is that the more they say it’s better than anything else, the less it’s likely to even deliver).
I took lot of abuse from MS shills (in real life and on the net) when they announced that they would:
– have a search engine better than Google (just because Google uses Linux). Most of them will still argue today that the MS search engine is better !!!
– open the source of part of their OS. Still not true today.
– open the specs of their Office formats. Still not true today.
– I’d have to say things about Windows but they would turn to troll (like USB not working plug&play at all in Windows, like when you change USB port and have to reinstall drivers, …)
– A lot I forgot because they are less prominent examples
For all of these, the shills will still argue with me today that MS delivered and that it’s better (though often, thay can’t support the lies for very long).
This monad thing is the same story.
Nothing is wrong with monad itself as long as it stays a Windows only thing (and it will, I predict it … no I know the patterns actually).
The problem appears when you compare it to other things.
When Windows shills can say such nonsense as “Monad being unique is true if you restrict yourself to Windows world”, well… I won’t tell you how stupid I think it is. At least it’s not insulting to true shells that works, some articles on the net are worse.
The pattern is simple : Windows shills won’t acknowledge anything that’s better in Linux, but as soon as MS does it, it’s better than in Linux. They won’t even wait to see the thing for real to say such nonsense, as soon as the MS heads announce the product, they think it’s god making predictions and that it will happen (another pattern of MS is that the more they say it’s better than anything else, the less it’s likely to even deliver).
Sounds just like the behavior of many Linux shills (and MacOS shills) for the past decade+. Zealotry isn’t platform specific.
Sorry but if you’re going to talk about shills then you are talking to the wrong person
Of course shills (actual ones, not just ones you accuse of being shills) are going to push every new MS thing like it’s amazing.
I still think you and many others are missing my point. While Windows has been severly lacking in the command line department for a long time, what they are offering is, in the opinion of some people including me, potentially better than command line for Unix. For a few reasons: (1) Being able to access anything from .Net (2) Piping objects instead of just text (3) Being only a complement to GUI and not a forced way to do things
It seems some people get offended when you suggest that a MS created command line might have advantages over Unix command line. OMFG UNIX HAD THIS 20 YEARS AGO WHY DONT YOU PRAISE IT FOR HOW GREAT IT IS. Great, thanks for the reminder. I didn’t know unix had a powerful command-line. It also seems like some people are acting like MS is claiming this is completely new, as in command-line didnt exist before. No. What is new is the implementation and certain features (e.g. piping objects)
Edited 2006-01-19 22:21
Microsoft came along and said “Hey you don’t need to pay that guy who knows all that 100,000 a year, you can get your PC tech to do almost the same tasks and pay them to do two jobs, network admin and PC tech. Save yourself tons of money in admin costs while you pay us a ton of money.”
MS certainly lowered the threshold required to administer its platforms; however, I’ve never read anywhere MS saying that it’s appropriate not to use professional administration of business machines. Can you provide a link to prove your point?
And now MS is going to come back and say, “Well guess what we are now going to make and interface that you can type cryptic commands into while in Windows, that will be native to Windows!” LOL!
Why do you insist on making this an either-or kind of thing? MS provides both a GUI and a command-line. MS isn’t saying that you have to choose one or the other. For chrissakes, use whatever tool suits the job. End of story.
Every single bit of administration that could only be done through the gui with no command line counterpart. net.exe and dos for loops only went so far and wsh was never well advertised, something you had to add yourself. Mortice Kern did more to make windows command line useful than MS ever did.
wsh was never well advertised, something you had to add yourself.
WSH has been included in Windows since Windows 98.
Will you have all the power from MSH that you do from a typical shell on Unix.
For example:
unlink
mkfifo
read
write
The thing about these four commands is that they’re ones few people use. But they’re commands which represent commonly used API functions that are applicable to shell usage.
Historically Windows has considered system access to be a programmatic only thing: C/C++/.Net. Are they going to open this up more to an interactive shell? Or will it be crippled?
Anything you can do in .NET you will be able to do through Monad. Yes, even make gui apps
Or will Vista come standard with the crappy cmd.exe offer Monad seperately ?
Or will Vista come standard with the crappy cmd.exe offer Monad seperately?
Last I heard, this is still fluid. At this point, it won’t be included with Vista, but will be available as a seperate download and as part of the Windows SDK. It will also ship with the next releases of Exchange and MOM (their admin functunality is built on Monad).
The pattern I’ve seen so far with every other OS by MS is that it will be completely useless without you buying an over-priced resource kit with no doubt Monad and everything else that should have been included.
The pattern I’ve seen so far with every other OS by MS is that it will be completely useless without you buying an over-priced resource kit with no doubt Monad and everything else that should have been included.
As stated earlier, Monad is and will be a free download (and included with some of MS’ server applications).
What resource kit are you referring to? Most resource kits are also free downloads.
I’ve only tried it on a couple workstations, but so far, like many products, it’s a nice idea with a poor implementation:
– Not only does Monad/msh require the .Net Framework to be installed on the host, it requires a very specific version of it in order to install.
– It’s slow. Much slower than cmd, or bash, ksh, etc. via Cygwin, Services for Unix, etc.
– It’s a memory hog. While it seems quite inconsistent in my trials so far, here’s one example: started an instance of cmd.exe and it’s using 2,520K of mem; starting an instance of msh.exe and it’s using 23,100K(!) of mem. No, it doesn’t do that all the time, but it’s absurd regardless.
– It keeps sucking memory. If I run ‘dir’ on my home directory in each shell, the mem usage for cmd doesn’t change; for msh it jumps to 23,532K. Running ‘dir’ again on “C:windows” yields no change in cmd, but bumps msh’s memory usage to 24,472K. And so on… Sometimes the mem usage gets freed up again after a period of time, while other times it doesn’t. And it’s not just commands like ‘dir’. I run ‘help *’ in msh & the mem usage jumps up to 48,952K! Again, the actual amount of memory change is not consistent across multiple runs, but it consistently uses surprisingly large amounts of memory.
– There are some things to like about Monad/msh, they’re just hard to take seriously given the current implementation issues. I will note that MS seems to have tried to do a decent job providing backwards-compatible aliases for commands (i.e. ‘kill’ for ‘stop-process’, ‘cd’ for ‘set-location’, etc.).
I’d be interested to find out if others are seeing similar issues or not…
I’ve only tried it on a couple workstations, but so far, like many products, it’s a nice idea with a poor implementation:
Well, it’s a beta. Things still can change.
Frist, msh is still in beta.
and yes it requires .NET 2.0 cuz its intergrated with .NET
and msh is very powerful, and allows you to pipe both test like unix and objects.
you can call into .NET and use its functions etc, alot of future stuff will be build and based on monad.
-Nex6