Friday, 10 June 2005

No Monad for Microsoft Longhorn

These days, Microsoft seems to be saying more about what vaunted technologies will not make it into Longhorn than those that will. The latest casualty of pressure to get Longhorn out the door and into the hands of customers is Microsoft's new command line scripting shell, known as "Monad" or MSH (Microsoft Shell).

Monad was slated to replace the command line in Windows with an object-oriented technology that rivals shells found on Unix systems. Beta versions of the software have been available to testers since early Longhorn alpha releases, but now Microsoft is looking further down the road with Monad. "It will take three to five years to fully develop and deliver," said Microsoft Senior Vice President Bob Muglia this week at Tech Ed 2005. "We're also building a next-generation user interface, taking our existing Microsoft Management Console (MMC) technology to the next level in terms of usability."

Monad is a fairly complex endeavour for Microsoft, which has previously focused its attention on the graphical interface while rival server software remains primarily command line based. The idea was to build a Unix-like shell for administrators that offers advanced scripting capabilities while remaining easy to program.