Monad and E12 details

At this website, there is a good deal of information on the forthcoming Monad Shell (MSH) that is slated to ship with E12.  This will be a new WMI based command shell that is supposed to give us all the tools that ESM provides but in a command shell scriptable interface.  Here is a few of the key data points from this post.

• The integration of MSH and Exchange 12 is that the command line management of Exchange will be done via Cmdlets and that graphical management will be a layer on top of those cmdlets.
• The roots of Monad are WMIC - a command line interface to WMI. I invented that and was struck by the power and leverage that you could provide if you had common object reflection. In the summer of 2001 I was learning .NET and realized that we could do the same thing with .NET. That was the start of the project. No one understood what I was talking about so I had to develop an extensive demo to illustrate it. Once I did that, everyone started drooling and off we went.
• There are currently no plans to ship an SSH server. I am aware that other teams within Microsoft are investigating secure remote access, but I don't have details available.
• We are very influenced by the VMS (and AS400) environments. That said, we don't have the same set of utilities. Do define you own command, you write a .NET class derived from our base class and tag it with a NOUN and VERB. The properties of that class become PARAMETERS.
• Monad will be leveraging the WS-MGMT protocol for remote execution. WS-MGMT is an emerging industry standard that will provide a common protocol to manage servers in both the PRE-OS environment (e.g. talking to the base motherboard controller) and the OS-resident environment. It's pretty awesome stuff.
• We are working to ensure a path forward for VBScript/WSH users. There are 2 directions to that. One the one hand, Monad will provide VBSCRIPT-style scripting in that you’ll be able to access COM object and invoke methods and access their prosperities. On the opposite direction, we are looking at providing a COM interface to Monad so that VBScript users will have access to all of it's functionality. This is NOT a booked plan but should give you a feel for how we are thinking about the issue (so let's just keep this info between those of us with access to the internet ;) ) . We are working to get a booked plan and then make it public.

 

To download a preview of Monad technology go to http://beta.microsoft.com/content/bphome.asp. The GuestID is mshPDC.