The advent of .NET and the almost simultaneous halting of Windows Scripting Host updates made me thing Microsoft had lost it's vision on scripting.  And although the very rich Monad scripting / command shell environment has a stated goal of edging you closer to native .NET programming, I'm still glad scripting on Microsoft platforms is being enhanced...

Monad is now offered as a Customer Technology Preview - in other words, a Public Beta.  It requires the .NET 2.0 Framework runtimes - so you may want to drop it in a VM if you're concerned about .NET 1.x interoperability.

The good news is Microsoft did a lot of research on what has worked well in for shell scripting in other robust environments such as Unix, AS/400 and DEC.  The downside to a greenfields approach is that every familiar command is renamed.  In addition, due to the sophistication of the environment there is some overhead in the complexity of doing simple tasks.  The experience of working with Monad may seem similar to first experiences with VBScript - where one had to learn new commands to create special objects to interact with various APIs such as WMI and ADSI.

While Monad extends very rich capabilities - it will take quite sometime for it to unseat shell scripting and vbscript.  Administrators generally create their scripts for the lowest common denominator in their environment.  Since Monad has platform and .NET dependencies - it will take a while until all desktop computers in a given organization can run Monad.  In addition, the learning curve almost always puts adminstrators off learning something like this for a lot longer than they would like it to.

Monad probably has the most potential on servers where it provides much richer, integrated scripting capabilities than currently available alternatives.

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Topic: "Scripting" "Windows Vista"