Read about Microsoft Shell a few months ago and it seems like it’s getting some serious attention. (maybe not as much as MS’s search engine pitch but I’ll hold fire for the moment).
MSH is a genuinely great idea from Microsoft. Not an unusual thing in itself but this is a bit different. To quote Udell
System administration has always been Windows’ Achilles’ heel. The graphical tools that simplify basic chores just get in the way when there’s heavy lifting to be done. And CMD.EXE, the hapless command shell, pales in comparison to the Unix shells that inspired it. Win32 Perl has been my ace in the hole, combining a powerful scripting language with extensions that can wield Windows’ directory, registry, event log, and COM services. But I’ve always thought there should be a better way.
Jeffrey Snover thought so, too. He’s the architect of Monad, aka MSH (Microsoft Shell), the radical new Windows command shell first shown at the Professional Developers Conference last fall.
MSH is quirky, complex, delightful, and utterly addictive. You can, for example, convert objects to and from XML so that programs that don’t natively speak .Net can have a crack at them. There’s SQL-like sorting and grouping. You write ad hoc extensions in a built-in scripting language that feels vaguely Perlish. (sd: reminds me a bit of bash scripting) For more permanent extensions, called cmdlets, you use .Net languages.
This will really appeal to hardcore MS administrators and Winadmins coming from a Unix background. Also this is potentially a reall cool tool to enable the policy based management of collections of windows boxes using .NET commandlets. Very tasty… Thank you Microsoft, just what the doc ordered..
