MSH Beta 3, running under Windows XP

MSH, or Microsoft Shell (codename Monad), is a command line interface (CLI) shell and scripting language product being developed by Microsoft. The interface is similar to Unix shells, but the product is based on object-oriented programming and the Microsoft .NET framework, and is highly extensible. Image File history File links Download high resolution version (1024x744, 38 KB) Summary self-made screenshot Licensing This is a screenshot of copyrighted computer software for Microsoft Windows, and copyright for it is most likely held by the author(s) or the company that created the software. ... Image File history File links Download high resolution version (1024x744, 38 KB) Summary self-made screenshot Licensing This is a screenshot of copyrighted computer software for Microsoft Windows, and copyright for it is most likely held by the author(s) or the company that created the software. ... Windows XP is a major revision of the Microsoft Windows operating system created for use on desktop and business computer systems. ... Microsoft codenames are the codenames given by Microsoft to products it has in development, before these products are given the names by which they appear on store shelves. ... Screenshot of a sample Bash session, taken on Gentoo Linux. ... Scripting languages (commonly called scripting programming languages or script languages) are computer programming languages initially used only for simple, repeated actions. ... Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT, SEHK: 4338) is an international computer technology corporation with 2005 global annual sales of close to $40 billion USD and about 64,000 employees in 85 countries and regions which develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. ... A Unix shell, also called the command line, provides the traditional user interface for the Unix operating system. ... In computer science, object-oriented programming, OOP for short, is a computer programming paradigm. ... The . ...

Microsoft originally intended to launch MSH along with Windows Vista, but later defined a separate release schedule for MSH. Microsoft sources confirm that MSH's first general availability release is to be part of the next edition of Microsoft Exchange Server (code named Exchange 12) which is scheduled for release in the second half of 2006. Microsoft published the second "Monad" public beta release on September 11, 2005 and released Beta 3 on January 10, 2006. The latest version is Beta 3.1 and it was published on February 27, 2006. Windows Vista is the next major version of Microsoft Windows, the proprietary operating system developed by Microsoft. ... Development stage terminology expresses how the development of a piece of software has progressed and how much further development it may require. ... Microsoft Exchange Server is a messaging and collaborative software product developed by Microsoft. ... 2006 (MMVI) is a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Development stage terminology expresses how the development of a piece of software has progressed and how much further development it may require. ... September 11 is the 254th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (255th in leap years). ... 2005 (MMV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... January 10 is the 10th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. ... February 27 is the 58th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 2006 (MMVI) is a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

MSH requires .NET Framework v2.0. Currently MSH is supported only on Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista, and Windows Server "Longhorn". MSH is currently not supported on the Itanium platform - Microsoft is still evaluating the need for an Itanium version of MSH. The . ... Windows XP is a major revision of the Microsoft Windows operating system created for use on desktop and business computer systems. ... Windows Server 2003 is the name of Microsofts line of server operating systems. ... Windows Vista is the next major version of Microsoft Windows, the proprietary operating system developed by Microsoft. ... Windows Server Longhorn is the codename for the next server operating system from Microsoft. ... Itanium 2 brand logo The Itanium 2 is the successor of the first Itanium processor and is an IA-64 architecture microprocessor. ...

History

Every released version of Microsoft DOS and Microsoft Windows for personal computers has featured a command line interface tool. These have been command.com (in installations relying on MS-DOS) and cmd.exe (in Windows NT and later installations). These were not always capable of reproducing or automating all the administrative functions available in the graphical user interface (GUI), although under Windows Server 2003, this situation is improved. This has been due to a combination of limitations within the command-line equivalents or because Microsoft did not provide full fidelity command-line equivalents. Microsofts disk operating system, MS-DOS, was Microsofts implementation of DOS, which was the first popular operating system for the IBM PC, and until recently, was widely used on the PC compatible platform. ... Windows redirects here. ... COMMAND.COM is the name for the default operating system shell (or command line interpreter) for DOS and 16/32bits versions of Windows (95/98/98 SE/Me). ... Microsofts disk operating system, MS-DOS, was Microsofts implementation of DOS, which was the first popular operating system for the IBM PC, and until recently, was widely used on the PC compatible platform. ... -1... Windows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993. ... A graphical user interface (or GUI, sometimes pronounced gooey) is a method of interacting with a computer through a metaphor of direct manipulation of graphical images and widgets in addition to text. ...

Additionally, for Unix admins, neither command.com nor cmd.exe are POSIX.2-conformant. Microsoft's Services for UNIX does includes a POSIX.2-conformant shell pdksh but this and other Unix shells are still incapable of performing many routine tasks relegated to the Windows GUI. While the Services for UNIX suite is now built into Windows Server 2003 R2, it was previously a for-sale add-on, which provided a barrier to adoption. POSIX is the collective name of a family of related standards specified by the IEEE to define the application programming interface (API) for software compatible with variants of the Unix OS. They are formally designated as IEEE 1003 and the international standard name is ISO/IEC 9945. ... Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT, SEHK: 4338) is an international computer technology corporation with 2005 global annual sales of close to $40 billion USD and about 64,000 employees in 85 countries and regions which develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. ... Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) is a package which provides a Unix compliant environment on Microsoft Windows computers. ... Korn shell logo. ... Wikibooks has more about this subject: Guide to Unix Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ...

Users have also been hindered by a lack of adequate documentation of command line functionality. By contrast, many GUI applications in Unix are only wrappers for documented command-line tools. Wikibooks has more about this subject: Guide to Unix Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ... A wrapper can refer to several things: In computer science: a wrapper pattern (such as a driver wrapper) is a design pattern where a piece of code allows classes to work together that normally could not because of incompatible interfaces. ...

Microsoft attempted to address some of these shortcomings by introducing the Windows Script Host in 1998 with Windows 98. The Windows Script Host was a new scripting layer which could implement a variety of scripting languages to control applications. However, the Script Host proved unpopular because it was not integrated with the shell, its documentation was not very accessible, and it quickly gained a reputation as a system vulnerability after several high-profile computer viruses exploited substantial weaknesses in its security provisions. The Microsoft Windows Script Host is distributed and installed by default on Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. ... 1998 (MCMXCVIII) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International Year of the Ocean. ... Windows 98 (codename Memphis) is a graphical operating system released on June 25, 1998 by Microsoft. ... Scripting languages (commonly called scripting programming languages or script languages) are computer programming languages initially used only for simple, repeated actions. ... In computer security, the word vulnerability refers to a weakness or other opening in a system. ... In computer security technology, a virus is a self-replicating program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into other executable code or documents (for a complete definition: see below). ...

Windows Server 2003 and certain versions of Windows XP included a command-line-based script host called Cscript.exe, but it was not fully integrated into the shell (cmd.exe). These operating systems provided other ad hoc CLIs as well, but they were not fully integrated, either. Windows Server 2003 is the name of Microsofts line of server operating systems. ... Windows XP is a major revision of the Microsoft Windows operating system created for use on desktop and business computer systems. ... An operating system is a special computer program that manages the relationship between application software, the wide variety of hardware that makes up a computer system, and the user of the system. ... Ad hoc is a Latin phrase which means for this [purpose]. It generally signifies a solution that has been tailored to a specific purpose, such as a tailor-made suit, a handcrafted network protocol, and specific-purpose equation and things like that. ...

Microsoft designed MSH to mitigate these problems—and to alleviate their onus of developing discrete GUI and CLI applications—by integrating a more secure scripting language into a new, extensible command shell capable of performing and automating the same core administrative tasks as the GUI. In most everyday tasks, MSH can be used in place of CMD.EXE and Windows Script Host (WSH). However, for backwards compatibility purposes both CMD.EXE and WSH will no doubt be around for a long time.

Central concepts

The system's codename, Monad, comes from Gottfried Leibniz's monadology, a philosophy in which the universe is a composite of fundamental elements called Monads that are integrated in a 'pre-established harmony'. Similarly, MSH is a composite of the complex tasks of a series of components. The components are special programs called cmdlets (pronounced command lets), which are .NET classes designed to use the features of the environment. The key difference between the usual Unix approach and the MSH one is that rather than creating a "pipeline" based on textual input and output, MSH passes data between the various cmdlets as objects (structured data). Unix does not preclude the use of arbitrary streams of data being passed between command line utilities, but textual input and output is the primary and most popular model. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (also von Leibni(t)z) (July 1 (June 21 Old Style) 1646, Leipzig – November 14, 1716, Hanover) was a German polymath, deemed a genius in his day and since. ... Monadology (1714) is one of Leibniz’s works that best define his philosophy. ... In the writings of the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, monads are atomistic mental objects which experience the world from a particular point of view. ... Gottfried Leibnizs theory of pre-established harmony is a philosophical theory about causation under which every substance only affects itself, but all the substances (both bodies and minds) in the world nevertheless seem to causally interact with each other because they have been programmed by God in advance to...

If accessed individually from the command-line, a commandlet's output will automatically be converted into text, but if its output is to be used by another commandlet, it will be converted into whatever form of object is most appropriate for that commandlet's input. This has the advantage of eliminating the need for the many text-processing utilities which are common in Unix pipelines, such as grep and awk, as well as allowing things to be combined interactively, or in a scripting environment, which would otherwise require a more complex programming language. For instance, a listing of processes will consist not of text describing them, but objects representing them, so that methods can be called on those objects without explicit reference to any outside structure or library. grep is a command line utility originally written for use with the Unix operating system. ... AWK is a general purpose computer language that is designed for processing text based data, either in files or data streams. ... Computer code (HTML with JavaScript) in a tool that uses syntax highlighting (colors) to help the developer see the purpose of each piece of code. ... Illustration of an application which may use libvorbisfile. ...

MSH is part of an overall strategy, centered around Vista, to treat all parts of the OS as .NET objects.

Features

Although still in development, a number of key features of MSH have already been revealed, including:

• A C#-like scripting language with many power user features such as direct support for hashtables, switch statements that can case on regular expressions, array slicing and anonymous methods (script blocks) that can be stored as data and then later executed. That is in addition to the normal scripting language features such as looping (for/foreach/while), conditionals (if/switch), variable scoping (global/script/local/private) and the abililty to define functions.
• Cmdlets all inherit certain options, allowing the user to choose things such as the level of interaction and how to deal with errors - including a "suspend" feature, which allows the user to enter a new command shell, investigate a problem, and then continue with the original command. A simple mechanism is built-in for the programmer to define the prompts to be shown in such circumstances.
• An extensible provider model provides not only access to and manipulation of the file system but also other hierarchical stores. For instance, MSH comes with a registry provider that allows you to access the regisry via the "HKLM" and "HKCU" drives. With this, you can browse the registry by executing commands like "dir HKLM:SOFTWAREMicrosoft" at the shell prompt. MSH comes with providers for the certificate store as well as environment variables, shell variables, functions and aliases. Like cmdlets the provider model is extensible allowing third parties to create their own provider model and snap it into MSH.
• The command line options are generally whole words, but can be specified as the minimum number of letters necessary (e.g. the option -show-detailed-information could be entered as -s if no other option began with 's')
• Comprehensive tab completion features. The cmd.exe shell in current versions of Windows can only complete file or directory names, in contrast to the advanced completion in shells such as bash.
• The ability to assign the output of a command to a variable, which will then be an object or array of objects inspectable in any way desired. For example you can output a command result directly to Excel.

Tab completion is a function of many command line interfaces, especially Unix shells, that allows portions of an incomplete filename or commands to be filled in when the Tab key is pressed. ... -1... UNIX Bash is the shell, or command language interpreter, that will appear in the GNU operating system. ... Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet program written and distributed by Microsoft for computers using the Microsoft Windows operating system and for Apple Macintosh computers. ...

External links

Monad Product Links

• Windows "Monad" Shell Beta 3.1 x86 Download Microsoft has released MSH Beta 3. To download this beta, you need to register (i.e. sign in with a .NET Passport). To install MSH Beta 3, you must have the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 RTM installed.
• Windows "Monad" Shell Beta 3.1 AMD64 Download (must sign in, as with the x86 download)
• Windows "Monad" Shell Beta 3 Documentation Pack

Monad Blogs and Blog Posting References

• Monad and the "First Vista Virus" - a Microsoft developer's rebuttal of security concerns
• An outdated set of links to blog entries related to MSH/Monad
• An up to date list of links to more information about Monad-MSH
• del.icio.us tags: monad msh monad+msh
• Links to Monad blogs.

Sample Monad Scripts A blog (or weblog) is a website in which messages are posted and displayed with the newest at the top. ... The website del. ...

• A set of sample MSH scripts which you can download and use.

Monad Articles

• A guided tour of the Microsoft Command Shell - A comprehensive, 13-page overview that thoroughly examines many aspects of MSH syntax, security, and .NET integration.
• Monad: The Future of Windows Scripting - an article in TechNet Magazine by Thomas Lee.
• Future Windows component could spur old-school script viruses - Monad's role in future security concerns, by Paul Roberts, IDG News Service

Other Monad Resources

• The .NET Show - a Microsoft video discussing various aspects of .NET and Vista (codenamed Longhorn). Search for "Jeffrey Snover" in the transcript for the discussion of MSH/Monad
• Channel 9 Video: More talking about Monad - This episode interviews the Monad architect: Jeffrey Snover.
• Channel9 Wiki: MSHWiki - A blog dedicated to MSH and MSH Scripts
• JaMSH - jaMSH is an interactive shell for Monad/MSH written to feel less like a DOS Prompt and with vi-mode command line editing.
• MSH Analyzer - MSH Analyzer - an interactive GUI shell for MSH, with rich editing, and a variety of ways to visualise returned data.
• Monad Remoting - Monad Remoting - an light-weighted server-client application to provide secure remote access to MSH.